


In Times of Peace

by SouthSideStory



Category: Naruto
Genre: Complete, F/M, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 13:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 50,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1780234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over, and like Konoha, Team 7 has rebuilt itself from the ground up. Everything has changed, but Sasuke and Sakura remain much the same. Eleven years, she thinks, is a long time to be in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sasuke remembers the old Konoha like this. Four Hokage faces shaped out of the golden bluff on the northern edge of the village. Wisdom and courage and history given form out of stone. White-washed stores with roofs red, blue, yellow, orange. A lone swing where a lonely boy once sat. Graffiti painted across unwatched walls. The green of leaves, grass, and flak-jackets, worn so proudly by chunin and jounin. 

What he can recall has always been tied to what he can see. Taste and touch and smell linger on the periphery of his awareness, senses bland and faded. Weak next to the brightness of color.

He inherited this as much as his kekkei genkai and his elemental affinity. Uchiha Fugaku taught his sons the importance of watching long before they could hope to awaken the Sharingan. Because while their blood might promise exceptional clarity of perception, this gift was wasted on a shinobi who could not tell the difference in seven kinds of snowflakes, or appreciate the hidden subtleties of human expression. 

This is the red of fresh blood, this is the red of a dying fire, this is the red of a maple tree in autumn. That is the smile Okaasan wears when she is truly happy, and that is the smile she wears when she is sad and doesn’t want her children to know it. 

But the old Konoha is as dead as his father, mother, and brother. All except the Hokage faces, now six where once there were four. Young men and women from old clans kiss, marry, and give birth to sons and daughters. A new generation of children run through the halls of the rebuilt Academy. Sakura presides over the hospital while Naruto presides over the village. 

The old Konoha is dead, but the new Konoha is alive, and what Sasuke remembers doesn’t much matter anymore. 

 

She watches her genin practice chakra control. Saito masters it almost as quickly as Sakura herself had at that same age, walking up the tree like he’s walking on the ground, but the other two struggle. 

Hyuuga Hachiro falls, again. He picks himself up, dusts off his clothes, and straightens his hitai-ate, making sure the cursed seal on his forehead remains covered. “I can’t do it, Sakura-sensei.”

Izumi kicks a nearby rock and pushes her short brown hair out of her face. “This is impossible.”

“I don’t want to hear that talk.” She takes Hachiro aside and says, “Your chakra is too weak. That’s why you keep losing your footing. Focus harder and try to summon a little more force, all right?”

Hachiro looks down. “Yes, sensei.” 

“And don’t worry too much. Did you know this is the same thing the Hokage struggled with when we were learning chakra control?”

“Really?” Hachiro, insecure by nature, brightens up for the first time since they started training today.

“Really.” She claps her student on the shoulder and tells him to get back to work. 

Sakura doesn’t bother instructing Izumi until she bounces off the tree trunk a few more times. As stubborn as Naruto, it takes a good dose of failure before the girl will willingly accept help. “Do you want to know what you’re doing wrong?” 

Izumi bends over, hands braced on her knees, breathing hard. “Yeah,” she says. 

“You’ve got the opposite problem of Hachiro. You’re chakra’s too strong, and it’s pushing you away from the tree. Relax and try to--” 

“Haruno Sakura!”

She turns to see a Hyuuga shinobi, Byakugan activated, wide white eyes set on her. “Hokage-sama demands your presence at the hospital!”

“ _Demands_?” She’ll give Naruto a piece of her mind when she sees him. 

“His wife is in labor, and they want no one but you to deliver the baby.”

_Oh, no_. Hinata’s due date is four weeks away. She tells her genin, “Keep practicing until you reach the top of your tree or I get back. Whichever comes first.” Then she says, “Come on!” to the Hyuuga messenger and runs from the training grounds. 

There is still a too-new look to the village. No peeling paint, no splintered wood. The little tell-tale signs of age and decay, missing. It bothers Sakura, this sense of the freshly built in a place as old as Konoha. As she runs through the streets, past apartments and restaurant stands and businesses, it reminds her of all that has been lost, all that cannot be returned or replaced. 

_This isn’t the time to think on that_. Naruto’s child will be born soon, and it’s Sakura’s responsibility to make sure both mother and baby remain safe. 

Even without the Byakugan to show the clearest path to the center of Konoha, she reaches the hospital before her Hyuuga escort. Sakura pushes through the glass double doors, and immediately she takes in the bright lights and pale walls and sharp smell of disinfectant. “Which room?” she asks the nearest nurse, and the woman hurries to lead her down a blue-tiled hallway. 

She finds Hinata and Naruto behind the fourth door on the right. It’s a large room, meant to hold three people, but any other patients have been cleared away to give the Hokage’s wife privacy. Hinata sits up in bed, sweat beading her skin, taking quick, shallow breaths and squeezing her husband’s hand. 

“Sakura-chan!” Naruto looks at her, big blue eyes nervous and wild. 

Sakura washes her hands, cleaning away the grit and dirt from training ground five. The spray of hot water calms her, reminds her that a simple hospital delivery, even if pre-term, is nothing compared to the injuries she’s dealt with in the field. 

Sakura checks the baby’s position and uses a simple jutsu to feel the child’s chakra flow and heartbeat. A little fast, but not abnormal or indicative of distress. Sakura examines Hinata and finds her almost fully dilated already. “The baby’s coming quickly, but I think she’s going to be fine.”

Hinata makes a soft noise of relief and leans back against the pillows, tears sliding down her cheeks. 

“That’s great! See, Hinata, nothing to worry--wait, did you say ‘she?’”

Sakura smiles and says, “Sorry. I forgot you wanted to wait to know. It’s a girl.”

 

An hour later, Hinata holds her daughter to her breast, and Naruto wraps his arms around his wife and child. He’s crying and grinning at the same time, and he strokes his callused thumb across the baby’s smooth little forehead. He kisses Hinata’s cheek and says, “Look at her. Look what we made together. She’s beautiful, huh?”

Sakura can only agree. The baby has a tuft of soft, dark hair like her mother and Naruto’s bright eyes. 

She hears creaking hinges but no footsteps and turns to see Sasuke. He’s dressed in street clothes. Plain black pants and some high-collared shirt that Sakura would bet her life has the Uchiha crest printed on the back. He stands in the doorway, as if unsure about whether or not he wants to come in.

Naruto looks up and smiles even wider. “Sasuke! Get over here and meet my daughter.”

Sasuke walks to the bed and glances down at the baby. “You got lucky, dobe. She looks like Hinata.” 

Naruto just laughs, clearly too happy to be bothered by his friend’s cheek. But Sakura thumps Sasuke on the back and he stares at her, fine eyebrows raised over his mismatched eyes. Like she’s surprised him for the first time in years (and maybe she has). “Be nice,” she says, because it’s what she would say to anyone else, and today of all days she’s not going to let him get under her skin. 

“Hn.” If her admonishment bothers him, Sasuke doesn’t show it. But then, his calm demeanor rarely betrays the feelings underneath. 

_If I knew how to read him it would have saved me a lot of heartbreak._

Naruto whispers something to Hinata, she nods, and he lifts their daughter. “Here,” says Naruto, and he puts the baby in Sasuke’s arms. Sakura expects him to shy away, but he doesn’t. Sasuke just accepts the blanket-wrapped bundle, if awkwardly.

“Make sure you support her head,” Sakura says.

“I know how to hold a baby,” he says quietly. 

Because she’s only ever known him alone, sometimes Sakura forgets how large a family Sasuke once had. A clan full of aunts and uncles and cousins. All gone now, of course, and the Uchiha compound with them, but once they were alive and breathing and Sasuke would have had many opportunities to hold babies. Far more than Sakura, whose parents are first-generation shinobi with no brothers or sisters themselves. 

For some reason it’s difficult to watch him this way. Expression as cool as ever, but hands careful as he cradles the newborn girl. Sasuke even gives her a gentle bounce, and the newest Uzumaki gurgles happily. 

“Do you know what you want to name her?” Sakura asks. 

Hinata says, “I was thinking, maybe, if you want to, Naruto-kun, we could call her Kushina.”

Naruto takes his wife’s hand, and when he speaks his voice is gruffer than usual. “Thank you, Hinata.”

“Congratulations,” Sakura says. “You two did good.”

Naruto smiles, looks at Hinata, and says, “Yeah, we did, didn’t we?” 

Sasuke returns little Kushina to her parents. “I should go.” 

“Me too,” Sakura says. “I left my genin running up trees.”

Naruto laughs and waves them away, too busy kissing his wife and counting his daughter’s toes to much care about his teammates. Sakura walks with Sasuke to the front entrance and out into the summer sunshine. It’s a beautiful June day, all green grass and blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Warm and peaceful. 

“Their daughter doesn’t have the Byakugan.”

“So what?” Sakura asks. 

Sasuke shrugs, as if his observation didn’t carry any sort of judgment, when she knows damn well it did. “She doesn’t need dojutsu to be a great kunoichi,” Sakura says. She walks faster, walks ahead of him.

“I didn’t say she did.” Sasuke puts a hand on her shoulder, and she nearly jumps. It’s the first time he has touched her outside of sparring since they were teenagers, and the warmth of him is startling. “You’re angry with me today.” 

She turns to face him, and they’re so close that she can breathe in the scent of smoke that lingers about him, that clings to his clothes. He always smells like he’s been standing next to an open fire. “I’m not,” Sakura lies, but her words come out weak, almost breathless. 

“Right.” Sasuke lets go, steps around her, and continues on into the village. 

She watches the back of him, strong shoulders and tapered waist, and sees that she was right; the Uchiha fan decorates the high collar of his shirt, red and white against the light grey fabric. 

 

Taro fucks her from behind, strong hands gripping her hips. The pressure of his fingers digging into her skin and the fullness of him between her legs almost hurts, but it’s a sweet pain. An ache laced with pleasure. He’s already made her come, and Sakura feels tender, hard-used, overwhelmed with feeling. It’s too much, almost. But then he loses his rhythm and his breaths grow faster, louder, and she knows he’s close. Taro pulls her against him once, twice, holds her there. He makes a strangled noise and spends himself inside her. 

Their bodies part almost as soon as they’re done. Taro moves out of her, away from her, and falls on the bed. Sakura just lets her knees slide down and lies on her stomach, the side of her face pressed against her pillow. She’s sweaty and sticky and too well-fucked to care. 

“This mattress is soft. Softer than anything a self-respecting shinobi should sleep on,” Taro says, in that light way he has that might or might not be a joke. 

“You’re welcome to sleep elsewhere.”

Taro just laughs and sits up. “I’m not sleeping here.” 

Of course he isn’t. He never does. 

They’ve been meeting up like this since last winter, and in six months of fucking they’ve yet to share a meal or spend the night together. She’s sure he sees other women, but Sakura can’t quite find it in herself to care. Taro visits when she asks and he gives her what she wants, at least for a little while. If, afterward, the loneliness settles in, and Sakura feels empty and thrown-away in the company of a man she doesn’t particularly like, then so be it. 

“I’m gonna take a shower,” Taro says, like this is his apartment instead of Sakura’s, and he has a right to her things. But she lets him bathe first, because he can be a bastard after sex and she’d rather not see him just now anyway. 

Sakura strips the rumpled sheets from the mattress. This is the third time she’s called Taro to come visit her in the past week, and her bedding could use a wash. She picks up her blanket too--they must have kicked it to the floor at some point between the first time and the second--and deposits her dirty laundry in a waiting basket. By the time she’s done stuffing it all in the washer, Taro steps out of her bathroom, skin damp and nearly naked. 

“All yours,” he says, and he looks so good with his short hair wet and messy, a towel wrapped around his narrow hips, that Sakura is tempted to drag him to her bare bed and have him again. But she’s tired and tired of his company and in need of a shower more than a fuck. 

“You can see yourself out,” she says. 

She finds the bathroom empty of steam, the mirror clear. Taro likes his showers almost cold and Sakura doesn’t, one of several reasons why they always bathe separately. She steps inside the stall, careful not to slip on the slick tile, and turns on the water. Hot, as hot as it will go. Her skin blushes under the heat and pressure, and Sakura feels fresh and new beneath the scalding spray, washed clean. She shampoos her hair slowly, soaps away sweat and come. Sakura takes her time, and she expects Taro to be gone when she finishes. 

 

Sakura’s apartment is located near the middle of the village, a stone’s throw from the hospital. Sasuke has been here a handful of times over the last six years, and he knows the way from the Hokage’s tower. Her building sits tucked between businesses in the market district, and it’s smaller and more modern than his own. When he reaches her door a neighbor’s cat winds itself around Sasuke’s ankle, mewling, and he bends to scratch it between the ears. Then he straightens, knocks, and waits for Sakura to answer.

Except when the door opens it isn’t his teammate. A shirtless man stands there, running a towel over his wet hair. He’s tall and strongly built. A shinobi, Sasuke can tell from the way the he holds himself, wary and alert. “What do you want?” he asks.

“I need to speak to Sakura.”

“She’s in the shower,” the man says. But he steps back, and Sasuke walks inside.

Sakura’s flat is messier than he’s seen it in the past. Empty cups litter the kitchen counter, her shoes are thrown haphazardly by the door, and there’s a pile of laundry on her couch, waiting to be folded. A green dress, a man’s shirt, and a pair of lacy underwear lie in the hallway. For some reason Sasuke can’t take his eyes off them. 

The man picks up his shirt from the floor and pulls it over his head. “I’m done here,” he says, smirking. “Just on my way out.”

The shinobi leaves, and Sasuke isn’t sorry to see the back of him. He takes a seat on the lone armchair in the den and wonders how much longer Sakura will be. 

He also wonders when she started letting men into her bed who clearly care nothing for her. 

Sasuke doesn’t have to wait long. Sakura soon walks out of her bedroom wearing a short robe. Her cheeks are pink, cherry blossom hair damp and disheveled, slender legs bare. When she sees him she jumps and grabs the belt around her waist, tightens it. Her pale eyes widen and she says, “Sasuke-kun.” She bites her lip as soon as the familiar honorific leaves her mouth. Sakura looks down at the discarded dress and panties and surreptitiously kicks the little heap of clothes into the bedroom behind her, like he hasn’t already seen them. Like it isn’t obvious why they were there.

“How long have you been here?” 

“Not very.” Long enough to see a man leave her apartment, which is what she’s really asking. Sasuke stands and says, “Naruto is sending us to Suna in his stead.” 

Sakura crosses her arms over her chest and walks closer to him. “Suna? For the alliance negotiations?”

“Yes.” She’s near enough now that he can smell the soap she used. Something herbal. “He’d go himself, but he doesn’t want to leave Hinata and the baby alone.” 

“Gaara would wait. He’d reschedule so he can meet with Naruto.”

Sasuke shrugs. “Maybe.” But this is a mission from the Hokage, not a suggestion from their friend.

Sakura must know as much. She sighs and asks, “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow.” 

“Right.” She runs a hand over her face, through her short hair. Sakura looks tired, and it’s not hard to guess why. “Do you want something to drink?” she asks.

“No, I should go.” He has nothing to do but training, but Sasuke is finding it difficult to look at her right now. Maybe it’s the way her shape shows through the thin material of her robe, or the swollen fullness of her well-kissed mouth. These are personal things. Things that are no more his business than the lacy underwear she tried to hide. 

“Meet me at the gate at dawn,” Sasuke says, and then he leaves.


	2. Chapter 2

When they set out in the morning the sky is overcast, grey with the promise of a summer storm. Warm rain begins to fall within an hour of leaving Konoha, and before long Sasuke is soaked. His high-collared shirt sticks to his neck and back wetly, and he resists the urge to pull it away from his skin. The sun never fully rises, hidden behind a wall of dark clouds, and the mud slows their progress. By nightfall they’ve only just reached the River Country.

Lightning branches across the sky, brilliant and purple against black, illuminating a small border town. Kyobetsu is its name, if memory serves. 

They stop beneath a tree and Sakura wrings out her dripping hair. “I feel like I’m in Amegakure,” she says. She wants to rest here for the night, he expects, but she won’t be the one to suggest it. Sakura is stubborn that way sometimes. 

“Let’s find an inn,” Sasuke says. “And get out of this rain.” 

Kyobetsu is barely the size of Konoha’s training ground six, so it only takes a few minutes for them to find the town’s single minshuku. The building is small and traditional, and Sasuke takes a moment to remove his shoes before stepping on the tatami-matted floor. Sakura does the same, but they still drip muddy water with every step. An old woman behind the front desk looks them up and down, scowling at the mess they’ve brought with them. 

“How much for two rooms?” Sakura asks. 

“We only have one left,” the woman says, and she frowns more deeply. “Are you married?”

Sakura gives a bright smile and says, “We’re brother and sister actually.” 

If she has the wits the kami gave a goose then this woman knows they’re lying. But she just huffs, names a price, and takes the ryo Sakura offers her. Then she gets out from behind the desk and leads them upstairs, opens the sliding door to their room, and waddles off. 

The space is plain but clean, with wooden walls, a low table, and a single futon. Sakura drops her shoes in the middle of the floor and goes to the bathroom. He hears running water inside and the heavy-falling rain outside. Bone weary and dirty and cursing Naruto for not having the patience to wait and go to Suna himself, Sasuke undresses, hangs his wet clothes over the back of a chair, and opens his pack to find something dry. He pulls on his night shirt and pants and settles himself beneath the covers. It would be more gentlemanly to offer the whole futon to Sakura and sleep on the floor, but Sasuke is too tired to give a damn. They can share. 

He falls asleep easily and slips into a red and black world. A boy again, he wanders familiar streets littered with the dead. Auntie Shizu. Uncle Hayato. Cousin Itsuki. Kunai everywhere, stuck in the walls and stuck in the bodies. At home he finds his father draped over his mother. Otousan and Okaasan, still and lifeless no matter how he shakes them. And big brother is there, crying crimson tears, reaching for Sasuke’s face, for his eyes. He runs from the house, runs for his miserable life, a coward, screaming--

“Sasuke! Sasuke, it’s just a dream.” 

Hands are gripping his arms, shaking him. Before Sasuke is even properly awake he has her on her back and he’s reaching for a katana that isn’t there. It’s dark, too dark to see properly, and he can barely breathe under the weight of this suffocating blindness. 

“Shh,” Sakura says. “It’s all right.” And he realizes that he’s trembling, crying, tears sliding down his face and dripping from his chin. Hesitant, gentle, Sakura cups his cheek and wipes away the wetness there. Her cool touch against his flushed skin startles him, but he doesn’t pull back. The contact is comforting, calming, and he leans into it without much thought. “It’s all right,” she says again. “Just a dream.” And that’s true, but the nightmare feels as real as it did when he walked through it as a child. 

Sakura strokes his face and utters soothing nonsense. He’s not really listening to her words, just the cadence of her voice. Grounding him, pulling him back to the reality of this rented room. Lightning strikes, and for an instant the woman beneath him is painted in shades of grey. With a crash of thunder she disappears back into darkness, but Sasuke can still feel her. Warm breath and soft body, careful medic’s fingers carding through his hair. 

It’s unwise to let his friend coddle him like this and probably unfair to her--he knows well enough that she loved him once. But then, he’s often weak where Sakura is concerned, and Sasuke has always been selfish. Too selfish to push away solace when he needs it this desperately. 

He lets her wrap her arms around his back, lets himself relax into the embrace. Sasuke’s heartbeat slows and Tsukuyomi colors fade from behind his closed eyelids. Memories of the long dead give way to the shadowed present. A minshuku in Kyobetsu where rain still pounds against the tile roof and the window shudders in its frame. He rests against Sakura, buries his face in the pillow beside her. Her hair is silky and he half expects it to smell of cherry blossoms, but it doesn’t. Just the cheap hotel soap she used earlier. 

“Sasuke-kun,” she whispers. “Are you okay?”

Sasuke knows that if he answers his voice will come out broken. So he says nothing. 

One of Sakura’s hands drifts beneath his shirt. Slips from the base of his spine to the nape of his neck. 

_What am I doing?_ He hasn’t leaned on another person for comfort since he was a child. Since before his family was massacred and his world turned upside down. Sakura’s words, her touch, they feel good--too good, really, because he can’t think straight while she’s running her fingers up and down his back like that. 

He’s reminded, oddly, of the night he left Konoha. The silent stillness of his bedroom as he packed his things. A golden moon hanging full in the sky, crickets chirping their evening song. Walking by the swing Naruto used to haunt. And Sakura, meeting him on the only road that led out of the village. He’s never asked her how she knew where to find him, how she knew he would be abandoning Konoha, and he probably never will. Sasuke remembers her confession, the way she begged him to stay. He knew he couldn’t do that. Still, he lingered by the stone bench where he laid her, looked at this girl he was leaving behind, and part of him--a weak part--wanted to pick her up and take her along as she’d asked. 

Now Sasuke pulls away, rolls onto his side away from Sakura, breathing hard. He wipes his face with his sleeve and tries to pretend he’s in his own bed at home, alone. It’s no good, though, because he can still feel the warmth of her body next to his on this narrow futon, and he hates that he wants her to hold him. But Sakura doesn’t speak, doesn’t reach out. So Sasuke closes his eyes and lets the sound of the summer storm lull him back into an empty, dreamless sleep. 

In the morning they speak politely to one another, unfamiliar and formal. Sasuke and Sakura leave Kyobetsu at sunrise, just as the rain stops, and they do not talk about the night before. 

 

This village is barren and windblown and hot. The sun beats down on them from a cloudless sky, a great expanse of wide and unforgiving blue. Sasuke wipes the sweat from his brow and follows Sakura. She leads him along a half-dozen winding streets, past brown buildings that look too alike for him to tell them apart. How she can navigate the sand and sameness that is Sunagakure, Sasuke doesn’t know, but she seems to find the Kazekage’s tower easily. 

A tall kunoichi with golden hair greets them in the foyer. She bows to Sakura and says, “Haruno-san. It’s an honor to finally meet you.”

His teammate blushes. “Um, thanks. And please call me Sakura.”

The kunoichi says, “I’m Ayane, Kankuro’s wife.”

“Oh, congratulations. How is Kankuro?”

“Very well.” Ayane steps closer and takes Sakura’s hand. An overly forward move, Sasuke thinks, but his friend doesn’t pull away. “I feel the need to thank you. You saved my husband’s life from that traitor Sasori’s poison, and if it wasn’t for you I never would have met him.”

Sakura’s flush deepens to a pink that rivals her hair. “There’s no need to thank me. Kankuro is a friend, and I was glad to help.”

Ayane smiles and says, “Come this way. Gaara-sama is in his office.”  
They follow her down the hallway and up a flight of stairs. Sasuke leans nearer to Sakura and says, too softly for their guide to hear, “Maybe she should have married you instead of Kankuro.”

Sakura laughs quietly. “You’re just jealous that I’m getting all the attention for once.”

“Hn.” As if he cares what some Sand shinobi thinks of him. 

Sasuke can’t afford to consider the opinion of foreign ninja. War hero or not, his brief affiliation with the Akatsuki ruined his international reputation--particularly in Kumo, where a one-armed Raikage still holds a grudge against him. And even in Konoha plenty of people still think the Fifth Hokage should have executed him for his crimes instead of pardoning them. It’s almost funny, because now he gets a taste of what Naruto suffered all those years as the village pariah. Except Sasuke knows he’s earned every bit of Konoha’s hate. 

Gaara looks much the same as he did six years ago. Pale, composed, every inch the military king that he is. He sits behind a wide desk cluttered with books and scrolls and a lone potted plant. It speaks to the privilege of this place, because the Kazekage’s simple fern might be the only green and growing thing in this village. A row of round windows line the walls of the office, and through them Sasuke can see the golden sun setting on golden Suna. 

“Kazekage-sama,” says Sakura. “The Hokage sends his regards and apologizes for not meeting with you in person, as planned--”

Gaara stands and says, “I received a messenger hawk from Naruto this morning. He said to expect the two of you.” 

“Oh. Of course. Well, Sasuke and I are ready to discuss the renewal of our alliance whenever you are.”

“Tomorrow at noon,” says Gaara. “Ayane will bring you to the council chamber when it’s time.” 

“Thank you, Kazekage-sama.” Sakura gives a small bow. Sasuke doesn’t bother. 

Then Ayane leads them down to the second floor, to a pair of comfortable rooms, much larger and better furnished than the one the Kyobetsu inn provided. (Sasuke tries not to think about the night before. How he cried like a child and clung to her, broken and desperate.)

“I’m not ready to sleep yet,” Sakura says. “Let’s go out and find something to do.”

Maybe he should just turn in early and get a good night’s rest, but Sasuke isn’t tired, and Sakura can be compelling when she’s in a certain mood. All girlish exuberance that reminds him of their genin days. So she pulls him along to a restaurant (no ramen, they agree) and then to a bar where Sasuke drinks shochu. Sakura orders a peach sake and downs cup after cup of the hot liquor. After a bottle he expects her to be slurring and sliding off her seat, but she is a neat drunk, nearly prim in her inebriation. The only difference in her, really, is that she smiles more easily and says what she’s thinking. Under the influence of rice wine she’s almost like the Sakura he remembers from childhood. Honest and open. 

Her legs cross and uncross, slender, white, and within reach. He’s had just enough shochu to want to grasp her thigh, but too little to actually do it. She leans closer to him and says, “Tell me something, Sasuke-kun. I’ve been wondering for a long time.” Sakura takes a breath, hitched and nervous, and her fingers tangle with his beneath the bar. “Why did you tell me, ‘Thank you’? What did it mean?”

He doesn’t have to ask the occasion. “That was ten years ago,” Sasuke says. 

“It was. But I think you remember.”

Instead of answering, he asks, “Would you really have come with me?” 

She smiles and bites her bottom lip, because yes, at thirteen, he was more important to her than her family, than her village. “You know I would have.”

“But not anymore,” he says.

And she agrees, “No. Of course not. You aren’t planning to go anywhere are you?”

Sasuke laughs, short and sharp and without much humor. “So Naruto could hound me across the world and try to drag me back? No thank you.”

Sakura shakes her head. “That isn’t why you won’t leave again,” she says. “You’ll stay because you love Konoha. Because it’s home.”

_And because it’s what Itachi would want._

That last sits between them, known but unsaid, and for that he’s thankful. Because it’s difficult just to think of his brother, and even harder to hear his name spoken aloud.

“You’re never going to answer that question,” Sakura says. She stands, surprisingly steady on her feet, and gives him a quick kiss. Fleeting love pressed to the corner of his mouth. Over before it’s barely begun, but the warmth of her touch lingers long after she says, “Goodnight, Sasuke-kun.” 

 

Sakura wakes with a headache throbbing in her temples, behind her eyes. She downs half a glass of water and showers and wishes that medical jutsu could cure a hangover. Last night comes back to her in fits and starts. Drinking with Sasuke. Talking with Sasuke. 

Kissing Sasuke.

Sakura would like to think she’d drunk enough to excuse that, but she knows she didn’t. 

She digs her formal clothes out of her pack. A blue dress with the Haruno crest on the back, short-sleeved and long enough to brush the middle of her calves. A quick look in the mirror shows dark circles beneath puffy eyes, damp hair, a pale face. 

Sasuke knocks--she knows it’s him by the way he raps his knuckles against the wood, three sharp strikes, impatient. Sakura opens the door, and he looks so put together that she feels even more a mess. 

“Morning,” she says.

He’s neat and handsome, wearing a traditional white shirt that opens in the front. Sasuke says something, but she’s too busy staring at his uncovered chest to catch it. 

“Sorry, what was that?”

He gives her an unimpressed look. Maybe because he knows what distracted her, or perhaps just because he doesn’t like to repeat himself. “I said, let’s get something to eat.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” 

They find a little restaurant close to the Kazekage’s residence, and Sakura eats plain, simple food: steamed rice and miso soup. Sasuke orders tamagoyaki and a number of rich side dishes, and the smell is enough to make her sensitive stomach roil. 

“Overdid it last night?” he asks, so smug that she’s tempted to dump her bowl of miso over his beautiful head. 

“No,” Sakura lies. 

“Hn. All right.” 

After that, breakfast becomes a mostly silent affair. Without Naruto to bully him into speech, Sasuke rarely has much to say. This does not bother Sakura, who is now used to long stretches of quiet between conversation. 

She takes small, careful bites of rice and looks out the window to see Suna in the late morning. Sun so hellishly bright and hot that she is glad to be indoors. Rounded, bronze colored buildings that look like nothing so much as sandcastles grown large. Shinobi, civilians, and children, all wearing the light layers that are common here. 

They return to their quarters just before noon and Ayane comes to get them a few minutes later. She leads them downstairs to the council chamber. A large, dark room decorated with the statues of the Kazekage and little else. Only two chairs are left unoccupied at the table, and she and Sasuke take their seats. 

Kankuro is barefaced. The last time Sakura saw him this way he was lying flat on his back, poisoned and near death. Now that she can see him both healthy and without make-up, she appreciates for the first time that Kankuro is a handsome man, in a gruff sort of way. He smiles when he sees her and says hello. Temari nods a cool greeting. Gaara’s other councilors do nothing, and in that nothingness their mistrust of Konoha, this alliance, and the Hokage’s envoys becomes apparent. 

The Kazekage says, “Let’s start,” and so negotiations begin.

They talk about trade between the hidden villages. The upcoming chunin exams, which will take place in Kiri this year. The Wind Country’s border dispute with the River Country, and how the Kazekage expects Konoha’s support if it should come to blows between Suna and Tani ninja. Sakura assures Gaara that the Leaf will assist the Sand in any martial conflict. Sasuke sits and listens and says nothing. 

_Some envoy you are, Sasuke-kun._

After the alliance is formally renewed, terms spelled out in a contract for both the Kazekage and Hokage to sign, Gaara invites them to dinner with his family. Sakura had hoped to leave Suna this afternoon, but one does not turn down a request from the head of a hidden village. Even if he is a personal friend. 

A few hours later, she and Sasuke meet Gaara, Temari, Kankuro, and Ayane in the dining room. Servants carry in the courses, and they are so sumptuous that she is glad her hangover dissipated in time for her to enjoy them. How the cooks got their hands on so much fresh fish in the middle of the desert, Sakura doesn't know and doesn't ask. 

Gaara looks at her in that careful way he has. "How is fatherhood suiting Naruto?" 

Sakura smiles. "Very well. Little Kushina has him wrapped around her finger already."

"He's going to spoil her," Sasuke says. 

"And you wouldn't do the same?"

"I wouldn't," he says, so simply but firmly that Sakura has to believe him.

"There are worse things you can do to your children than spoiling them," Gaara says.

She can't see how anyone at this particular table can disagree with that sentiment. And indeed, no one does. Sakura takes a bite of rice and keeps quiet while talk turns to Suna matters. Gaara and Temari argue about whether or not her genin are ready to go to Kiri for the chunin exams. Ayane brings up a conflict between two of the village's oldest clans, the Himemiya and Ohtori. 

Kankuro asks for Sakura to tell how she and Chiyo defeated Sasori. "I've never heard the details," he says. "I'm curious about how you took the bastard down."

He's never heard the details because Sakura has never shared them with anyone, and the other two people who could have told the full story are dead. She prefers not to even think about that fight.

“It isn’t really good dinner conversation--”

Temari laughs. “We’re all shinobi here. I’m sure it won’t turn anyone’s stomach.”

Then Sasuke says, “Tell us. I’d like to hear how you killed one of the Akatsuki.” 

_And I’d like to hear how you became one of them_ , Sakura thinks but doesn’t say.

It's been years since she faced Sasori, but she remembers it like it was yesterday, and the words come easier than she expected. She tells them about destroying Hiruko. Then the Third Kazekage. The horror of Sasori's body, that mechanical abomination, forever youthful. Chiyo's ten puppets and her grandson's hundred. Sasori's deception and the katana Sakura took in the stomach. (She does not tell them about the pain of that injury, or the way poison burned like fire in her veins. She does not say that there are still nights when she dreams of the puppet master, of dying slowly on his sword, and wakes in a cold sweat.) And finally, Sasori's death, the way he fell lifeless in the embrace of his own creations, models of the mother and father that he had lost. 

When she grows quiet, it is Gaara who speaks first. "Chiyo was a remarkable kunoichi, and so are you, Sakura." He bows his head. It is not lost on her what it means, for a Kazekage to honor a foreign ninja in this way. "Thank you for sharing your story with us." 

“You’re welcome.”

On the way back to their rooms, Sasuke says, “You almost died for a woman you barely knew.” His tone is level, any inflection of emotion absent. If he thinks her brave or foolish or kind, Sakura can’t tell it by his voice. 

“Yes,” she says and doesn’t offer any more than that.

Sasuke’s brow furrows, and she supposes that for a man like him, utterly selfish in his actions, such a sacrifice must make no sense. 

She hopes, sometimes, that the day will come when she and Sasuke finally understand one another. She hopes, but doesn’t count on it.

Cold darkness falls across the desert, and Sakura is afraid to go to sleep. Certain that she will see puppets and swords behind her closed eyelids. She lies awake, staring up at nothing. Aware of the soft cotton sheets, the enveloping black and echoing silence of the room around her. She turns on her side, pulls the blanket over her head, and wills herself to relax and slip into slumber. But it’s no good, and she spends the night turning from side to side. Trying to forget the feeling of steel sliding through her body, of poison killing her by inches. And Chiyo dying to give Gaara a second life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Himemiya and Ohtori clans are a reference to the wonderful anime Revolutionary Girl Utena.


	3. Chapter 3

Konoha seems impossibly bright after the dull, dun colors of Suna. All green life and vividly painted buildings. Sakura is glad to see her village, even if it does still look too-new to her eyes. 

She spends her first day back at the hospital, the second training her genin brats, and the third cooking with Ino. Sakura chops up four different kinds of mushrooms and negi while her friend measures out soy sauce and sake. 

“Still fucking the bastard?” Ino asks.

“His name is Taro,” Sakura says. Not that it will do any good to correct her. The year she’d dated Hideki, Ino refused to call him anything but “the chunin.” As if Sakura needed a reminder that she outranked her boyfriend. Hideki certainly couldn’t forget. He’d hated that she was a jounin, a war hero, apprentice to the Fifth Hokage and friend of the Sixth, and a far better ninja than he could hope to be. When she found out he was cheating on her with a civilian she broke his nose, and that was the end of that. 

“Give me those mushrooms,” Ino says. “Anyway, you should dump him.”

“I can’t dump him; we’re not dating.”

Her friend snorts, takes the mushrooms from Sakura and puts them in a pan. “Call it whatever you want, just drop him.”

“I don’t want to. The sex is good.” For once. 

Hideki’s prowess in the bedroom had been no more impressive than his skill in combat. They’d dated eleven months, but he never made her come. 

And Kenji, her first--well, she had slept with him just the once. She’d been tipsy and the war was over and she made her last, failed attempt to get Sasuke's attention. So she went home with Kenji, but it hurt and he wasn't gentle and he wasn't Sasuke. Sakura waited until he was gone to cry. Kenji complained that she was bad in bed to his Anbu buddies, and so half the village knew Haruno Sakura was frigid by the end of the week. From the careful way that Naruto and Sasuke looked around her in the days afterward, she knew her teammates had heard too.

Ino might be pushy, but she is not cruel, and she never brings up Kenji. 

Now she sautees the mushrooms and says, “I know you. Fucking around might be enough for some women, but you’re not that cosmopolitan. You need to find a man more faithful than the chunin and more loving than the bastard.” Ino pops a shiitake mushroom into her mouth. “Hmm. Needs more time. Oh, and check on the rice.”

“I already did, while you were busy lecturing me, Pig.”

“It’s a lecture you should pay attention to, Forehead.” Ino gives her a superior look, the same kind she has been sending Sakura’s direction since their Academy days. “If you aren’t too busy lounging around my kitchen, get me some sake.”

She rolls her eyes and pours a cup for her friend. (Sakura’s last hangover is too fresh in her memory to want any for herself.) Ino drinks it and says, “Fine, I’ll stop giving you perfectly reasonable advice, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

“Then we’ll talk about something else. How was your mission with Sasuke?” Sakura doesn’t like Ino’s smile. It’s sly, like she thinks she didn’t change the subject at all. 

Sakura shrugs. “Fine. Not exactly action filled. It was just a trip to Suna.”

“Uh huh. And did the last Uchiha act like a jackass or an actual human being?”

Sakura considers and says, “I think he was somewhere between the two.” A jackass part of the trip, certainly, but he was friendly enough with her for the most part, and their night in Kyobetsu--that was as real as she’d ever seen Sasuke. Much as she hated to witness his pain, Sakura couldn’t forget the way he’d let her hold him. Vulnerable and unguarded, allowing himself to take comfort in her arms. Until he pulled away, of course.

“You’re blushing,” Ino says, gleeful. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” Nothing she’ll ever tell anyone. That moment, the two of them tangled together on a rented bed, is private.

Ino pours chicken stock over the mushrooms and adds harusame noodles and diced negi to the broth. Then Sakura takes over and stirs the soup as it heats. “So how are you and Shikamaru?” she asks.

_You’re not the only one who can meddle, Pig._

Ino looks away, clearly a little annoyed. “We’re fine.” 

“Getting married yet?”

“We’re not even together, Billboard Brow!” Ino’s cheeks pinken and she leans against the counter, arms crossed over her chest.

Sakura laughs. “Give me the salt, sake, and soy sauce when you’re done sulking.” 

It might be true that Ino and Shikamaru aren’t officially a couple, but the two have been living under the same roof for years. They’d started sleeping with each other shortly after the war ended, and a few months later Ino quietly moved in with her teammate. Both deny dating, but anyone with eyes can see they’re in love. 

“Budge over,” Ino says. “I’m going to finish this up before you ruin it.”

Sakura steps aside and lets her friend season the soup with the remaining ingredients. “So how’s your mother?” 

“Fine,” says Ino. “She’s seeing someone. Really good guy named Tetsuya.”

Surprised, Sakura smiles. “That’s great. I know you’ve been hoping she’d start to go out again.”

Ino stops stirring and says, voice small, “Does it make me a bitch that I kind of don’t like Tetsuya? I mean he’s nice and everything, and he treats her right, so that’s all that should matter, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Sakura says, carefully. “But it’s okay to feel however you feel, and that doesn’t make you anything but a daughter who misses her father.”

“Yeah, sure.” Ino sniffs and dabs at her eyes, mumbles something about the steam getting to her. 

She looks away, gives her friend a moment to collect herself without an audience. Sakura knows she is lucky, but sometimes she forgets just how fortunate she is to have escaped the war without losing any of her teammates, parents, or sensei. The greatest trauma she’s suffered isn’t the loss of a loved one. It’s being left behind, again and again, by the boy she has loved for half her life. 

 

This is the green of freshly cut grass. This is the green of the Naka River that once flowed through Uchiha land. This is the green of Haruno Sakura’s eyes when she is happy. 

Sasuke still plays these little games of sight and perception. He thinks of it as habit, but it might be closer to nostalgia. Some fragment of his childhood that hasn’t been tainted by death and ruin. Now he answers his door, and when he sees that it’s Sakura, Sasuke starts comparing greens without even thinking about it. 

“Hi,” she says, smiling.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

She falters, smile slipping away as quickly as it appeared. “I just thought, since we’re both between missions at the moment and I don’t have my genin today, it might be a good time to train.”

If she isn’t teaching her students this morning that’s entirely Sakura’s prerogative, but he doesn’t say as much. “Sure. Let’s go.” 

Sasuke chooses training ground eight, one of the smaller, wooded areas, hilly and pockmarked by numerous ponds. “Anything but forty-four,” Sakura says. A stranger might think she’s joking, but Sasuke knows better. She means every word.

Sakura walks a little ahead of him. “Do you want to start over there by--”

He unsheathes his katana--blunt-edged for sparring--and almost gets his first strike, but she jumps out of the way just in time. Sakura pulls a kunai and says, “That was a cheap shot.”

“We’re shinobi, not samurai.”

She comes at him, and the fight begins in earnest. Sasuke is able to nimbly evade her attacks--he’s always been faster than her. But he can’t afford to let her land even one hit. With her chakra-infused strength, that’s all it will take to get him down. He dodges, jumps backward, and right before his feet touch the ground, it opens up beneath him. Sakura aimed her last strike at the earth, and it split apart while he was in the air. He barely lands beside the crater instead of in it. Sasuke feels the sharingan awaken in his right eye, and suddenly he sees everything with perfect clarity. Sakura’s movements seem slow now, slow enough to maneuver around easily. 

Sasuke catches her hand signs--tiger, dragon, monkey, snake, horse, ram--but he doesn’t know this technique, so it doesn’t matter if he can see the seals. A wall of water rushes in his direction, something like a small tsunami, and even as he jumps up, grabbing for a tree branch, he knows that it won’t be high enough. Water rushes into him, and the coldness is as jarring as the force behind it. He’s pushed to the ground, battered against the earth by the jutsu. Soaked, Sasuke picks himself up, stands amidst the little river Sakura has created, and barely misses being pummeled by her. 

“Where’d you learn that?” he asks, and tosses a few shuriken. “I’ve never seen you use that jutsu before.”

Sakura bats the throwing stars away with her kunai like they’re nothing more than bothersome flies. “It’s my elemental type. I know a lot of water ninjutsu you’ve never seen.” Then she laughs and says, “And I’ve been studying with Kakashi-sensei.”

If Sakura has been working with the damn Copy Ninja, there’s no telling what she’s picked up. 

Sasuke rushes her, fast, and brings his katana down in a sweeping arc. She deflects the blow with her kunai, steel screeching against steel, and tries to drive her free fist into his ribs, but he sees the movement long before her punch can land, and he steps around her, behind her. Grabs her hair and pulls her neck back. He brings his sword to her throat so the cold, blunted edge presses against her skin.

He’s won the first round. For a moment, Sasuke holds her in place. Fingers clutching that soft hair, his body pressed against hers. He can hear her harsh breathing and the frustrated noise she makes in the back of her throat. “Let me go, Sasuke!” 

He lowers his katana, releases her, and steps back. Sakura turns to face him and says, “That damn dojutsu. It’s not fair to use it.” 

“If this were a real fight I’d be using the Sharingan.”

“Oh, come off it. You’re not going to try to kill me _again_ are you?”

That irritates him. “Well, I don’t know, Sakura, are you going to try to stab me with a poison kunai?”

“Maybe,” she says, so flippant that for a second he has the absurd desire to laugh. “And besides, when am I ever going to see the Sharingan in a real battle?”

Never is, of course, the answer to that question, because every Uchiha besides himself is dead. 

Sakura covers her mouth, like she wishes she could recall the words that have already left her lips. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why are you apologizing?” Sasuke sheaths his katana. “Do you really think anything you could say might hurt me?”

“I still shouldn’t have said it.” She walks toward him. Wary but gentle, the way you might approach a startled animal, Sakura reaches out and places her hand on his arm. She feels warm against his wet skin, and Sasuke realizes that he wants this. He has been craving contact ever since that night in Kyobetsu, though he isn’t sure why. Maybe because she was a pretty girl who grew into a beautiful woman, and it’s simply been too long since he had a good fuck. He doubts there’s more to it than that. 

Sasuke pulls back. “Don’t touch me,” he says. 

But Sakura steps forward, frowning, and grabs him by both arms. She says, “It was fine for me to touch you a few days ago. You let me hold you. Do you remember that, Sasuke?”

How could he forget? He sobbed in her arms, and she comforted him. Calmed him by caressing his face, his back. “Of course I remember.”

“You liked it,” Sakura says, now quiet, almost shy, and she isn’t wrong. “You liked me touching you. So why push me away?” She runs her hands up to his shoulders, over his chest, and it takes every ounce of his self-control not to lean into her. 

For a man who is always supposed to see what’s coming, Sasuke is having trouble predicting anything where Sakura is concerned.

“Stop it,” he says, more harshly than he meant to, and now it’s her turn to pull back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought--I thought you wanted me to--never mind.” Her voice breaks. She turns and walks away from him.

This is the green of Haruno Sakura’s eyes when he has made her cry. 

 

Sakura throws a handful of shuriken. One, two, three, they strike the dummy exactly where she intends. Throat, heart, and liver. She tries to forget her own stupidity by practicing her aim. 

What was she thinking? She knows how private Sasuke is, how guarded and possessive of his own space. Sakura knows, and still she touched him. Why had she done that?

Eleven years, she thinks, is a long time to be in love with someone. 

Time has worn it down to a dull hurt, gentler than the sharp ache she remembers from her early youth. She wants to be rid of it, this suffocating affection that leaves no room for lesser loves. Sakura gave her virginity to Kenji and her commitment to Hideki and her body to Taro, but none of them has ever come close to her heart. And she understands with the simple certainty borne of knowing a hard truth that no man besides Sasuke ever will. 

Sakura lies down on the ground and looks up at the sky. Forget-me-not blue streaked with feathery white clouds. She smells the green summer scent of mown grass, feels the tickle of the recently cut blades against her bare shoulders and the backs of her legs. Somewhere nearby, a mockingbird sings its borrowed song. It is a beautiful day to wish for a fresh start. 

She stays this way until Shino arrives with his students in tow and asks if she is done. Then she stands, brushes grass and dirt off of her combat clothes, and leaves training ground seven to people who will actually use it. Sakura goes home, showers, changes into her medic uniform, and heads to the hospital. Her shift isn’t supposed to start for another three hours, but even during peacetime there is always work to be done. 

Today her patients include: an old shinobi who dislocated a shoulder while sparring; three burned chunin, fresh from a mission that went south; a pregnant civilian, five months along, in for a routine checkup; and one of her own genin. 

Hachiro’s mother says, “He fell out of a tree and broke his leg.” From her tone, Sakura can tell that Hyuuga Yuzuki is disappointed. 

“How did you do that?” Sakura asks, a little surprised that Hachiro, whose balance is normally impeccable, sustained an injury this way. 

He looks down and says, “I was practicing my chakra control, sensei. I almost got to the top of the tree, too, but then I lost my footing.” 

Yuzuki shakes her head. “Unbelieveable. Why didn’t you have your Byakugan activated?”

Hachiro fidgets, and the nervous motion of his hands reminds her of a young Hinata. “I did,” he says softly.

“I’m gonna take a look,” Sakura says. “And I’ll get you all patched up. How does that sound?”

Hachiro smiles, if weakly, and lets her examine his leg. Sakura focuses her chakra to her hands and then uses it to feel through skin and muscle to the bone beneath. “It’s a hairline fracture to the fibula,” she says. “This won’t take five minutes to fix.”

Her student is the best patient she’s had all day. Quiet and uncomplaining, he sits perfectly still while Sakura mends his leg. “You’re tougher than the squad of chunin I healed earlier. Two of them cursed at me and the other one cried.” Of course, they were suffering from second degree burns, but Sakura doesn’t mention this. 

“It’s a good thing you weren’t practicing walking on water,” Yuzuki says. “Or you might have drowned.”

_If she opens her mouth one more time I’m kicking her out of the room._

“There, all done,” says Sakura. “Try walking and tell me how it feels.”

Hachiro scoots off of the exam table and takes a few careful steps. “Most of the pain is gone, but it’s still a little sore.”

“That’s normal. It’ll probably be tender for the next few hours, but after that you’ll feel as good as new.”

“Thank you, sensei.”

“No problem.” 

Sakura can’t help but think that if she’d chosen to teach her genin this morning instead of sparring with Sasuke, Hachiro never would have tried running up a tree on his own. 

“Meet me at training ground ten tomorrow at noon,” she says. “It sounds like you’ve almost gotten the hang of it, but I’ll help you fine tune things, okay?”

Hachiro nods, and Yuzuki takes him home. 

Sakura doesn’t have a favorite among her students--she learned from Kakashi what _not_ to do in this regard--and she sees something of herself in each of them. Saito has the perfect chakra control and collected disposition necessary to master medical ninjutsu, and she plans to begin teaching him a few simple techniques over the next few months. Izumi, a first-generation ninja, exhibits the same kind of hell-bent determination to prove herself that Sakura felt during her apprenticeship with Tsunade-shishou. But Hachiro reminds her of herself in the worst of ways. He struggles more than his teammates and has to work twice as hard to do half as well. Hachiro is the weak link in his three-man squad, and he knows it. Just like Sakura once knew.


	4. Chapter 4

“Give me a mission,” Sasuke says. 

Naruto ruffles the back of his hair and holds out a scroll. “Here. This is a B-rank escort--”

“Don’t insult me, dobe.” 

“Show a little respect to your Hokage, asshole! And I can’t give you every S-rank mission that comes through this office.”

“No, but you can give me one today.” Sasuke wants to get out of Konoha, soon.

Naruto grumbles something about ungrateful subordinates and digs through the scrolls on his desk. “Take this. It’s an infiltration and assassination.” 

Sasuke skims over the mission directive. He’ll need to pose as a mercenary and offer his services to the missing-nin Fujimoto Gorou, leader of a ring of criminals straight out of the Bingo Book. Intel collected by Konoha indicates that he has an outpost not far from Kusa. Once inside, he is to gather information on Fujimoto’s confederates, then eliminate him. 

A mission like that will take days, possibly weeks. 

Perfect. “This will do,” Sasuke says. 

Naruto snorts. “Well I’m glad assassination is all it takes to make you happy. Wanna get some ramen? I’m almost done here.” 

“Don’t you want to go home to your wife?” 

“Hinata took Kushina to see Hanabi and Hiashi,” says Naruto.

“Fine, then.”

Sasuke knows it’s futile to suggest something different for dinner. He waits for Naruto to finish his correspondence, and then they go to Ichiraku. The sun has already set on the village, and the warm light of the restaurant is a welcoming beacon in the dusk. 

“Oy!” Naruto yells. “Sakura-chan!”

Sasuke turns to see their teammate. She’s wearing her medic clothes, hair pulled up in a short ponytail, walking from the direction of the hospital, so he assumes she just finished her shift at work. 

“Hey, Naruto,” she calls. Then, “Sasuke.”

Because he was taught never to shout across a public area in such a way, Sasuke nods a hello. 

Naruto waves in a manner somewhat undignified for the Hokage. “Come get dinner with us!” 

She hesitates, glancing between the two men who have bookended her life. Naruto, so eager, and Sasuke, who’s trying to look as indifferent as he doesn’t feel. He must succeed, because when Sakura comes closer it’s only to say, “Next time.”

Naruto is never so easily brushed off. “No, this time,” he says, and takes her by the arm.

“Naruto!” she says, in the voice she usually adopts before clocking someone. But she lets him half-drag her into Ichiraku all the same. Sakura scrambles to sit beside Naruto instead of him. She’s so obvious about it that Sasuke has the petty urge to change seats. Instead, he picks up a menu that he doesn’t need and looks over the list of items that he’s memorized over the last six years. “Tonkotsu,” he says, and a few minutes later Teuchi sits a large bowl of pork broth and noodles before him. 

Tonight Sakura orders Shoyu without the chili oil (predictable, she hates spicy food) and Naruto asks for three different kinds of ramen.

“My best customer,” Teuchi says proudly.

They eat without talking until Naruto has finished his second bowl. Then he says, “So, Sasuke, when are you gonna leave?”

“Leave?” Sakura looks up, a noodle dangling from between her lips. She blushes and covers her mouth. 

“Yeah. I just gave him a mission to go after some old S-rank criminal hiding out near Kusa.”

Sasuke sighs. “Say that a little louder, Naruto. I don’t think the people on the street heard you.” 

“S-rank?” Sakura asks. “He must be tough.” 

Naruto nods and goes on blithely. “It’s Fujimoto Gorou. Apparently he and his men gave the Sannin a hard time in Ame at some point.”

“I know who he is,” she says. “Tsunade-shishou told me all about him.” Sakura looks at Sasuke and asks, voice careful, “Did Orochimaru ever--”

“No,” he says.

“I’m sure you’re more than capable of facing Fujimoto,” says Sakura. “But you shouldn’t take him lightly.”

“What makes you think I would?”

She’s quiet for a long moment, maybe weighing the worth of what she wants to say. “Because you’re arrogant and you never think anyone’s a threat until they half-kill you.”

The accusation doesn’t sting--perhaps because he’s as conceited as she suggests--but it does surprise him. Sakura has loved him and held him and tried to poison him, but she has never once insulted him that Sasuke can recall. 

Naruto laughs and says, “She’s got you there.”

“Hn.” He finishes his ramen and pays. “I’m heading home.”

“Already?” Naruto asks.

“Better get a good night’s sleep if I want to be prepared to face such a dangerous criminal.” Sarcasm is lost on the dobe, but Sakura is much smarter and she frowns. 

He expects her to say something. A final warning to take Fujimoto seriously or a simple farewell. Sasuke does not expect her to slap her own ryo on the counter and follow him out of Ichiraku, but that’s what Sakura does. She walks with him for one block, two, three. Silent. They pass the avenue that leads to her apartment, and still she stays beside him, saying nothing. Sasuke’s patience runs thin as they near his own building, and he asks, “What do you want?”

Sakura stops in the middle of the road. He keeps walking until there are a few yards between them. Sasuke considers going on, leaving her stranded here on this deserted street, but he can’t do it. He turns to face her.

“I’m still in love with you,” Sakura says. Easily, plainly, as if what she’s talking about is no more important than the weather. “I know you don’t feel the same, so don’t worry about me trying to pursue you.”

There is a stone bench nearby, and no, it does not escape him, how almost-funny it is when Sakura chooses to sit there. Except that there is nothing funny about this. She pulls the rubber band from her hair and runs her fingers through the choppy, pink locks. It is a bad time, he thinks, to notice that although he usually prefers long hair on women, he likes Sakura’s short. 

“The last time I said this it was because I thought it might convince you to stay with me,” she says. “But I’m not that little girl anymore, and I know not to expect anything from you.” 

“Why are you telling me?” he asks

“Because I have to. Because it’s been eleven years--half my life, Sasuke--and I’m tired of carrying it around like a secret. I’ve done everything else I can think of to get rid of this feeling. I’ve tried to bury it in training, and I’ve tried giving myself to other men, but it doesn’t work. Nothing works. So maybe if I say it out loud, if I tell you, maybe then it will finally go away.”

Sasuke can’t think what to say. She keeps surprising him, this woman he thought he had figured out. He’d assumed that her love for him died when she tried to stab him in the back, but apparently he was wrong. And what a stupid presumption to make, really, because shouldn’t he know better than anyone how enmeshed love and violence can be? Hadn’t Itachi taught him that lesson?

There’s something else, too. A possessive pull that he feels when he considers Sakura sleeping with another man. He thinks about her fucking the shinobi he met at her apartment, and Sasuke realizes he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it at all. 

She smiles at him. “Do me a favor. Don’t say, ‘Thank you.’ Don’t say anything, okay?” 

Sasuke should be relieved that he doesn’t have to respond, and he is. But an hour later, when he’s alone in his bed, unable to sleep, he understands that he is also disappointed. Because he isn’t sure, given the opportunity, how exactly he might have answered Sakura’s confession. 

 

Hachiro waves at her from the top of the tree, and Sakura can’t help but smile. 

“Good job!” she calls. “You’ve got it.” 

He runs back down the trunk and then leaps to the ground, landing with the grace and precision his clan is famous for. “Thanks for helping me, Sakura-sensei,” he says. 

“That’s what I’m here for.” She ruffles Hachiro’s long, dark hair and laughs when he ducks away. 

“Tomorrow I’ll start teaching you and the others how to walk on water,” she says. “Let Saito and Izumi know to meet up here at six.”

“Six?” he asks, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t relish the idea of practicing at dawn. 

Sakura shrugs. “It’s as early for me as it is for you. I have an afternoon shift at the hospital, though, so it’s then or never.”

Hachiro is a good kid, and he doesn’t gripe the way Saito and Izumi undoubtedly will. He just thanks her again and then sets off for home, a confident bounce in his step. He has so much untapped talent, and it just takes a little extra coaxing to bring it out of him. If he can learn not to second-guess himself so much, Sakura thinks he will make a strong shinobi, a credit to the Hyuuga and to Konoha. Perhaps she can be the one to help him reach his potential, the way Tsunade-shishou helped her. 

Sakura practices her taijutsu, and as she moves through one kata into the next, she wonders where Tsunade is and how she’s doing. The Fifth Hokage left Konoha the day Naruto took office, and although Leaf ninja occasionally reported seeing her in various places throughout the Fire Country, she had yet to return to the village for a visit. 

Sakura wonders, too, about Sasuke. If he’ll take his mission and Fujimoto Gorou as seriously as he should. If he’s thinking of her and what she admitted to him last night. Maybe she ought to regret her moment of boldness, but she doesn’t. It was the right thing to do, and she feels, if anything, relieved. Lighter and freer for having spoken the truth aloud. Sasuke can do what he will with the information--and most likely he’ll choose to do nothing--but Sakura didn’t say her piece for his benefit. She said it for herself.

By the time she finishes her forms it’s going on three o’clock. Sakura is sweaty and dirty, but she promised to have tea with her mother and now she’s too short on time to go back to her apartment and shower. She runs from the training grounds to the west side of town, to the place her parents moved into after Konoha’s reconstruction. It isn’t the house she grew up in--it isn’t _home_ \--but Sakura likes it well enough and she knows her way there. 

Okaasan answers the door. “You’re late,” she says.

“Sorry.” She might offer an excuse, but her mother would see right through it anyway. Sakura takes off her shoes and sets them beside the door, careful to arrange them neatly. 

Two cups of tea wait at the kitchen table. When she sips hers, Sakura finds that it’s no longer hot. She is wise enough not to mention this. 

“So, how are you doing?” her mother asks.

“Busy. The hospital’s overflowing, as usual, and the genin are keeping me on my toes.” 

“Well, I hope you’re getting enough rest. You look tired, sweetheart.”

Sakura sips her cooling tea, then says, “I’m fine. And I’m sleeping plenty.”

“I just worry about you. You’re so young to bear so much responsibility.”

Sakura has accepted that Okaasan will never truly treat her like an adult, but it doesn’t bother her the way it used to. She appreciates, now, that her mother’s overbearing tendencies are steeped in love and concern, not lack of belief in her daughter’s maturity. 

“Where’s Otousan?” Sakura asks. 

“On a mission to Takigakure. He’s going to be gone a week at least.” Okaasan frowns, and the lines bracketing her mouth deepen. “The fool is missing our twenty-sixth anniversary to escort some old dignitary.”

Sakura knows that it isn’t the anniversary that really bothers her mother. Okaasan misses her husband when he leaves the village for more than a few days, and she always finds some reason to complain about it. They’re very close, her mother and father, and very loving. 

When she was younger, Sakura used to be embarrassed that her parents were only genin. Most shinobi their age were chunin at least. She knew, vaguely, that her father had failed the exam twice as a boy, and her mother, for some reason, had never taken it. It was a disadvantage to her own career that neither of her parents--who were themselves the children of civilians--had never become elite ninja, and for a time Sakura resented this. Now, though, she only feels thankful, because her parents’ ranks kept them out of the war, and it is not on low-level missions where shinobi usually lose their lives. 

She thinks of Naruto’s parents and Sasuke’s clan. Ino’s father and Shikamaru’s father and Hyuuga Neji. Power carries a heavy price, and it is so often the strongest who die first. 

But they live in a peaceful time now, and Sakura doesn’t have to worry about Otousan and Oksaasan ending up like the Fourth Hokage or Yamanaka Inoichi. With any luck, they will retire in a few years, a blessing so few ninja are granted. 

“You look like you’re thinking too hard,” her mother says.

“Guilty,” Sakura admits. 

“Anything I should know?” 

She pretends to deliberate, then says, “Just that I love you, and I’m happy to be your daughter.”

“I love you too, sweetheart, and you know how proud I am of you,” says Okaasan. “Your cup is empty. Do you want more tea?”

Sakura smiles. “Yes, please. That would be wonderful.”

 

Infiltrating the outpost is easier than Sasuke expects. He uses a transformation jutsu to change his appearance, then allows himself to be caught by scouts. They take him straight to Fujimoto Gorou. The missing-nin is a tall man with narrow, pale eyes and long white hair pulled back in a braid. He smiles in a way that reminds Sasuke of Orochimaru. 

“You were sneaking around my land,” Fujimoto says. “Why?”

Sasuke stands straighter. “I hear you hire fighting men, and I need work.”

“Is that so?” Fujimoto takes in his slight build and unassuming face. “You don’t look like much of a fighter.”

Sasuke elbows the man to his left in the neck, and he falls to the ground, choking. The two remaining scouts rush him. The first he knocks out with the hilt of his katana. He takes his time with the second, showing off his taijutsu, then wraps him in wire and dumps him at his boss’s feet. 

Fujimoto laughs. “What’s your name, friend?”

“Kenta.” 

“Well then, Kenta. Welcome.”

The next phase of the mission proves more difficult. Sasuke spends the following weeks earning Fujimoto’s recognition and what passes for his trust. The man is wary and intelligent and he asks sharp questions, but he’s more interested in Sasuke’s skill at arms than his background. He makes himself useful when Fujimoto requires a bodyguard, and at his side he gathers a wealth of information on the man’s allies and subordinates. Hamasaki Haru runs an underground prostitution ring out of the city Tosogawa. Akiyama Etsuko is an assassin who sells her sword to the highest bidder, and she’s recently been employed by Fujimoto to eliminate a former comrade. Inoue Hideyoshi, a defector of Amegakure, plans to break into his old village’s vaults and steal a scroll full of forbidden techniques. There are others--missing-nin, rogue samurai, plain criminals--and Sasuke takes note of their names, abilities, and whereabouts.

At night, if he isn’t busy performing some task or another for Fujimoto, he lies on his narrow cot, alone, and enjoys the lack of subterfuge. Sasuke’s transformation may be impeccable, but he has never been comfortable adopting a false skin. So in the few quiet moments granted to him here, he closes his eyes and remembers who he is. An Uchiha. A ninja of the Leaf. A brother. Darkness and solitude give him fleeting freedom from this mission, and he realizes that he misses home. Konoha with all its bustling activity. His own bed in his own house. Naruto’s relentless chatter. And Sakura, though he can’t afford to indulge thinking about her just now. 

Killing Fujimoto will be the real challenge. The shinobi is cautious, and he keeps guards about his person and outside his chambers at all times. Sasuke could kill these men, but they are not his target and he would prefer to spare them. 

Opportunity presents itself on the twenty-third day. Fujimoto leaves his outpost to meet with an associate on the Fire Country border. He chooses only three companions to accompany him: Haruki, Chinatsu, and Sasuke. 

 

Sakura does not allow herself to worry about Sasuke. His mission is running long, yes, but the man is one of the strongest shinobi she knows. He can handle himself. 

She pours a cup of tea in the break room. Hot, strong, no sugar or cream. It tastes of cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger, the spices of summer. Sakura sits, drinks, and tries not to measure minutes until her rounds start. 

The door opens with a bang and Akiko rushes in. “Sakura-san,” she says. “You better come quick.”

She has not worried about Sasuke, so when Akiko leads her to a room where he lies, pale and barely conscious and covered in blood, she is, for just a moment, too surprised to move. Then her training kicks in and she pushes through the other medic-nin. Rough, rude, and not sorry for it. Sakura knows she is the best, and only the best will work on Sasuke-kun. 

She looks at him and sees red. Sharingan awake in his right eye. Blood everywhere, splattered across his face and hands, soaking his clothes, far too much to be just his own. Raw panic rises inside her, threatens to break past the detached discipline Tsunade drilled into her years ago. She needs to focus. She needs to keep it together if she wants to save his life. 

Sakura opens his torn shirt and finds a large laceration stretching diagonally across his chest and abdomen. It’s long and ugly but only moderately deep. Not life-threatening in itself, but he’s been on his feet since the fight, racing back to Konoha, and he’s lost too much blood. She wonders how he traveled so far--how he even made it across the village--in this condition. 

Sakura gathers her chakra to her hands and begins working on the wound. Sealing skin back together, knitting muscle, reconnecting nerves. She can feel every dimension of the damage done to him, the trauma of it sings beneath her fingers, and if she wasn’t certain Sasuke had already killed Fujimoto, she would want to do so herself. She stops once the newly mended flesh shows only a pink line from collarbone to navel. Then she puts her hands over Sasuke’s wrists, over his pulse points, and the beating against her palms is weak. So faint for a man of such strength. Her chakra saturates his veins, forces the rapid reproduction of blood. New cells and platelets and plasma. Slowly, color comes back to his cheeks and she can sense his vitals evening out. Heart rate, respiration, oxygen level, and pressure returning to normal. When this is done, she moves to the mark on his chest and finishes repairing the skin. The scar dissipates beneath her touch. Fades into nothing, as if it were never there. 

Sasuke’s eyes are closed now, the Sharingan and Rinnegan hidden. 

“Clean him up,” Sakura says. “And I want a nurse to monitor him for the rest of the night.”

This, she knows, is an unnecessary precaution, but she will not gamble with Sasuke’s life. 

Then Sakura walks to the locker room on trembling legs. She strips naked and steps into the shower. Twists the handle and stands beneath the stream of water that grows hot and hotter until the stall fills with suffocating steam. She leans against the cold tile wall, numb. Counts to ten, twenty, one hundred, ticking off numbers in her head so she doesn’t have to think about other things. Feeling gradually returns to her limbs, and Sakura washes herself. Scrubs with harsh hospital soap until her skin is tender and pink. Then she turns off the water and dries her body with a scratchy, no-nonsense towel. Fishes a fresh uniform out of her locker and dresses. 

She tells herself this is just another work day. She tells herself such a lie so that she can move one foot in front of the other. So she does not go to Sasuke’s room and sit by his bedside until he opens his eyes. 

Sakura looks at her clean hands, which seem suddenly foreign, as if they belong to someone else. Some other medic who just watched the man she loves almost die.


	5. Chapter 5

Sasuke wakes to sunlight and the smell of apples. 

He sits up, and his recently regenerated flesh stings with latent soreness. But this is nothing compared to the pain he carried across half of the Fire Country, and Sasuke ignores it. His mouth is dry, tongue like sandpaper, his stomach empty. He takes a cup of water from the bedside table, drinks it all without breaking for breath, and when he’s done he is still thirsty. 

Two apples sit beside the water pitcher. The first is ruddy but flushed with gold. The other crimson, skin shining as if polished, perfect as fruit from a fairy tale. Sasuke picks up the red one and takes a bite. Crisp and sweet, a ripe summer taste, but it’s the color that sparks a memory. He recalls, suddenly, how his brother used to eat every bit of an apple. Even the core and seeds. Like all things, large and small, that he remembers about Itachi, this hurts to dwell on. 

Sasuke knows where the fruit came from, though he isn’t sure what its presence means.

He doesn’t regret attacking Sakura the day she tried to poison him--they were enemies, skilled shinobi facing off as equals, and she had every intention of killing him--but when he thinks about knocking a plate of sliced apples out of her hands, he feels something between uneasiness and remorse. A dull shame for acting so childishly, for hurting a girl who deserved better. 

Sasuke gets out of bed and dresses in the clean clothes someone brought him--no doubt one of his teammates (probably Sakura; Naruto isn’t that thoughtful). He gingerly steps into his undershorts and pants, pulls the shirt over his head. 

“What are you doing?” It’s Sakura, standing in the doorway, hand on one hip. “You can’t be out of bed yet,” she says. 

“Obviously I can.” Sasuke makes to walk past her, but she stretches out her arm, blocking the exit. 

He notices that she isn’t wearing her medic uniform. This is her time off, but she came back to her workplace to visit him. 

“Please,” Sakura says. “At least let me check you over before you go.” There’s something in the way she’s looking at him--soft, honest, supplicating--that makes it difficult for him to leave. 

“Fine.” 

Sasuke takes off his shirt and allows her to listen to his heart and lungs. She presses firm fingers against his stomach and chest and asks if it hurts. It does, but so mildly that he just says, “No.” 

Then she puts a thermometer in his mouth, and Sasuke sits there, feeling stupid and ill-humored. “We gave you medicines to prevent infection,” Sakura says. “But I want to make sure you don’t have a fever.” 

His temperature is slightly elevated, but Sasuke tells her not to worry about this. “It’s always like that. Has been since I was a child.” When he was little his mother used to say that he had fire in his blood, like all Uchiha.

“Well, you’re free to go if you want,” Sakura says. “Though I wish you would stay another night.”

Sasuke hates hospitals. They reek of death and sickness, human vulnerability on display, and so often within these walls dignity is traded for survival. He won’t linger any longer than he has to.

“How did you get hurt so badly?” Sakura asks. 

The fight comes back to him easily. Injuring Chinatsu and killing Haruki, because the man wouldn’t stay out of the way. Then facing Fujimoto. The old missing-nin was a formidable shinobi, skilled with his blade, and he turned out to possess a wind-fire kekkei genkai that set the dry grass around them aflame. 

It is not easy for Sasuke to admit when he’s wrong. “I did exactly what you told me not to. I underestimated Fujimoto.” He could have used Susanoo. Its protection would have shielded him from any jutsu his opponent was capable of performing. But Sasuke deemed it an unnecessary use of chakra and chose not to summon the guardian. If he had been less presumptuous--less arrogant--he never would have been harmed. 

And he ended up half-dead, as Sakura warned against weeks ago. 

She does not chastise him, and she does not gloat, as the dobe would have. Instead, Sakura asks, “How did you kill him?”

She gives no consideration to the possibility that Sasuke failed his mission, and he feels an odd surge of pride at that. “Chidori through the throat.”

She flinches and says, “That couldn’t have been pretty.”

No, it wasn’t. By the end, Fujimoto’s head was only hanging from the rest of his body by a narrow strip of skin and sinew. 

Blood loss dulls his memory of entering the hospital, but Sasuke knows he saw Sakura before he passed out. “You healed me, didn’t you?” He says it like a question, even though it isn’t, not really.

“Yes,” Sakura says. “You were pretty torn up, Sasuke-kun. It--” She pauses, bites her bottom lip, even teeth white against the plump pinkness of her mouth. Then she says, quickly, like she’s rushing to get the words out before she changes her mind, “It scared me.” 

Why this is hard for her to voice, when she freely admitted she loved him, Sasuke isn’t sure. 

She saved his life, quickly and skillfully, and now there isn’t a hint of a mark to commemorate the wound he took. So he says, “Thank you.”

Sakura seems surprised. He wonders, belatedly, if she even wants gratitude from the man who abandoned her. Who left her unconscious on a stone bench with nothing but the very words he just spoke. 

She gives him a small smile. “You’re welcome.”

Silence falls between them, but it is a comfortable quiet. Full of shared experiences and mutual regard, none of the awkwardness that spells itself out between strangers’ sentences. 

Then he says, “I have to go. I gathered a lot of intel on my mission and I need to report my findings to Naruto.”

Sakura nods. “He’ll be glad to see you doing better. He was here most of last night, even though we don’t usually let anyone stay that late besides family.”

Sasuke does not point out that Naruto is the closest thing to family he has left. He doesn’t need to; Sakura understands. 

“Please take it easy for the next day or two. Sometimes, even if you feel fine, there’s internal damage that was missed--”

“You didn’t miss anything,” Sasuke says. 

“How can you possibly know that?” she asks. 

The answer is as short as it is simple: “Because I know you.”

Sakura blushes and tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I appreciate your confidence,” she says. “But I’m not perfect and I do make mistakes. So no rough training or anything, okay?”

Sasuke says, “Hn.” She can take that as a “Yes” or a “No” as she likes.

He notices for the first time how tired Sakura looks--purple shadows color the delicate skin beneath the fringe of her lower eyelashes--and he thinks maybe Naruto wasn’t the only one who stayed with him last night. There was a time when such a thought would have bothered Sasuke. He hates anybody witnessing his weaknesses, and, for reasons he would rather not examine, this is especially true where Sakura is concerned (it is why a plate of apple slices ended up on another hospital floor all those years ago). But he finds that, just now, he doesn’t mind.

“I’ll see you later,” Sakura says. “Please tell Naruto I said hello.” 

“Sure.”

Sasuke leaves for the Hokage’s tower. It’s bright outside, and the sun seems over-large in the sky, white-gold, overbearing. And it’s hot. Hot like Suna, except the air here swims with humidity. He begins to sweat as he heads toward the north end of town, and the soreness in his chest and stomach worsens the further he walks. He has been healed enough times to know that this residual tenderness is normal, but that doesn’t mean he likes it any better. 

Sasuke makes his way through the throng of villagers, thinking about Sakura. 

She does not come from an old clan. She has not inherited dojutsu, or suffered the mixed blessing of the jinchuriki’s life. She was not burdened with excessive strength and responsibility from birth, and she is not the great reincarnated child of a sage. She is not anything by virtue of destiny.

Everything she is, she made herself. Through hard work and talent and sheer determination she has become the fiercest kunoichi in Konoha, and possibly the best medic-nin in any hidden village. Sakura’s power was not bequeathed to her by blood or fate. She earned every bit of it, drew it from within herself alone, and Sasuke can’t help but respect this. 

 

Despite Sasuke’s requests to go back into the field, Naruto refuses to assign any new missions to him for a full two weeks. 

“I’m perfectly fine,” he says. “Sakura cleared me to leave the hospital days ago.”

“She didn’t clear you! She advised you to stay longer, and you left anyway.” 

_Dammit, Sakura_. Sometimes he thinks she tells Naruto everything. The two are absurdly close. Best friends and confidantes, their bond strengthened over the trial of bringing him back to Konoha. Perhaps because he spent so much time as the center of their attention--the object of Sakura’s affection and the target for Naruto’s rivalry--it still seems strange to Sasuke, how much his teammates trust and depend upon one another. Far more than they trust or depend upon him, but he knows that this is only fair. He did, after all, betray both his friends and the Leaf, many times and in many ways. That they manage to put any faith in him is a gift, not a thing owed. 

He stands before the Hokage’s desk, and he doesn’t fail to realize that, while they are two friends having an argument, they’re also a leader and a subordinate. Naruto retains the power and privilege of his office, which means that if he wants to keep Sasuke confined to the village, there’s nothing to stop him. 

“I left because there isn’t anything wrong with me,” he says, slowly and deliberately, like he’s speaking to a child. Or an idiot.

Naruto huffs. “Maybe you’re okay physically, but to be honest I’m worried about your, uh--what’s the word Sakura-chan used? Oh yeah, your competence.”

“My what?” Sasuke asks. 

“Your competence,” Naruto repeats helpfully. “It means--”

“I know what it means.” The day he needs a vocabulary lesson from Uzumaki Naruto will be a sad day indeed. 

He scratches the back of his head and says, “I read your report. It doesn’t look so good, Sasuke.”

“I finished the mission. I gathered valuable information and the target is dead. What else do you want?”

Naruto leans forward in his chair. Suddenly his easygoing body language is gone, and when he speaks there’s a rough edge to his voice. A hint of red bleeds into the blue of his eyes. “You nearly died and you could have lost an important mission. All because you were sloppy and full of yourself. So take a little time off and figure out how not to fuck up so bad next time.” 

“And Sakura, what exactly does she have to say about all this?”

The scarlet tinge fades from Naruto’s irises as quickly as it appeared. “Sakura-chan agrees with me. She called you careless.” 

Careless and incompetent. This is what his friends have been discussing behind his back.

It irritates Sasuke, how they occasionally talk around him and about him instead of to him. How they rely so completely on each other. He has always had a jealous nature, borne from living in the shadow of his prodigy brother, then strengthened by losing at such a young age the things that most children take for granted. He knows it’s envy he feels, and he has even had the unworthy thought that maybe something happened between Naruto and Sakura during those years he was away from the village. 

There is little that makes him angrier faster than considering this possibility, so he tries not to. 

Now he bows to the Hokage, and if it is a little too exaggerated to be meant respectfully, Naruto does not comment on it. 

Sasuke walks out of the office, then the building, and heads for Sakura’s apartment. If she has concerns about his abilities she can express them to his face. 

 

“There’s someone knocking,” Okaasan says. “Do you want me to get it?”

“No. You watch the stove.” Sakura leaves lunch in her mother’s hands, goes to the living room, and answers the door.

Sasuke stands on her front step. He doesn’t look angry, but she can tell from the rigid way he holds himself that something is wrong. “You told Naruto I’m too incompetent to do my job?” he asks.

“No!” Sakura walks outside and closes the door behind her. Anybody strolling by could witness this conversation, but she’d rather a stranger overhear than her parents. “I said I was concerned because you were careless on your mission with Fujimoto and you’re usually much more capable than that.”

“Well, I’m suspended for two weeks,” he says, somewhat mulishly.

Sakura crosses her arms over her chest. “That isn’t my fault.”

“You didn’t have any right to go complaining about me to the damn Hokage--”

“Don’t talk to me about what I have the right to do. Not when you stumble into my hospital bleeding to death.” 

Sasuke laughs, but it’s a curt, rough sound. “You don’t report on the other injured shinobi you treat.”

“No,” Sakura says, clearly and precisely, so he can’t misunderstand. “But I don’t love them.”

That shuts him up, as she thought it might.

The door opens behind her and she turns to see Otousan. He smiles and says, “Sasuke! Why didn’t you invite him in, Sakura?”

“He isn’t staying.” 

Otousan frowns at her. “Don’t be rude, your mother and I raised you better than that. Of course he’s staying. Come on in, both of you, the food is almost ready.” 

Sasuke’s eyes widen, and he looks more unnerved by a family lunch than he did when he was bleeding out under her hands. “That’s all right, Haruno-san, I’m not really hungry.”

Haruno-san? When does Sasuke ever grant anyone the respect of an honorific?

Her father waves his hand and says, “Nonsense. You’ll join us.”

And this is how Sakura, Sasuke, and her parents end up framing the four sides of her cheap kitchen table. She sits and eats and reflects on the simple fact that her mother and father will never stop involving themselves in her business. 

“How are you feeling, Sasuke?” Okaasan asks. “Sakura told us you were hurt pretty badly on your last mission.”

“I’m fine,” Sasuke says, and she’s thankful that at least he answers politely, keeps his tone civil. “Sakura healed me very thoroughly.” Then his mouth curves into a sharp, little smile and he adds, “I’m even already prepared to get back to work.”

_Smartass_. Sakura smiles back at him. “You’re always in such a rush to get out of Konoha, Sasuke-kun.”

The table talk ceases, but Sakura just sips a spoonful of suimono soup and pretends not to notice this. The look Sasuke gives her would intimidate a lesser woman, but she has never been afraid of him--even when perhaps she should have been--and she doesn’t intend to start today. 

Otousan clears his throat and says, “So, anything new going on at the hospital?”

“Not really. Same old, same old.” Except that she had to save one of her teammates’ lives. Again. 

Conversation turns to the political. Okaasan criticizes the old daimyo, who, according to her, continues to spite the Fire Country by refusing to die. Otousan pokes fun at his wife’s strong views: “Why don’t you just assassinate him, Mebuki?”

“I might if he raises our taxes again,” her mother says darkly. 

Sakura smiles into her teacup, and even Sasuke looks mildly amused. 

It is, surprisingly, a pleasant meal. Her parents refrain from asking Sasuke personal questions or telling embarrassing childhood stories. Sakura sits there, half afraid that her mother will reveal how, during her genin days, she had little to say besides “Sasuke-kun” this and “Sasuke-kun” that. His favorite color (blue) and favorite food (tomatoes) and how Ino told her that he likes girls with long hair. As if hoarding such hollow information would add up to a meaningful understanding of the boy she so admired. But Okaasan does not announce anything of the sort, and Sakura is relieved. 

After everyone finishes lunch, her father claps Sasuke on the shoulder and says, “It was good to see you. You should come around for dinner one of these nights.”

“Maybe,” he says. Which probably means “Never.”

Her parents return to their own house, leaving Sasuke and Sakura alone in her apartment. She gathers the dirty dishes, puts them in the sink, and turns on the water. She washes a bowl, mostly to give herself something to do.

“Are you still mad?” Sakura asks. 

“Yes,” he says, though he sounds more tired than anything. “But not at you.” 

Sasuke picks up a towel and takes the freshly rinsed bowl from the right side of the sink. 

“You don’t have to do that,” she says. “You’re a guest.” 

“I don’t mind it.” He dries the bowl as methodically as he does everything else. “I used to help my mother with the dishes. It was nice, spending time with her that way.”

Sasuke rarely speaks about his past, about the family he lost so violently, and it always catches her off-guard when he mentions his parents or his brother. “Was your mother a kunoichi?” 

“Yes, but she stopped taking missions after she had Itachi and me. I don’t know if that was her choice or my father’s. I never thought to ask.” 

“I think I wouldn’t do that, if I ever have kids,” Sakura says. She scrubs the pot she cooked the soup in, rinses it beneath the jet of hot water, and hands it to Sasuke. 

“No?” he asks. “Then who would watch the children when you and your husband are both on missions?”

Sakura smiles and says, “Maybe I’ll marry a handsome civilian and have a nice house-husband.” 

Sasuke scowls. “I doubt it,” he says. “Doesn’t seem to be your type.” 

That’s true enough. Kenji, Hideki, Taro, Sasuke. The only thing those four men have in common is that they are all shinobi.

“What about you?” she asks. “I can’t picture you staying home with kids. Would you want your wife to do that?”

He shakes his head and says, “Not really my choice. But no, I wouldn’t want my wife to give up the kunoichi’s life. Maybe that worked for my parents, but I’m very different from my father.”

This doesn’t much surprise her. Although Sasuke is traditional in many ways, he’s also drawn to power. And while the women who keep homes for their families do have a particular sort of strength about them, Sakura can’t imagine him married to anyone who couldn’t also support him on the battlefield.

She turns off the water and gives the last spoon to Sasuke. He dries it quickly and sets it on the counter with the rest of the clean dishes. He has stacked the plates and bowls and turned all of the cups upside down. It’s such a neat, characteristically fastidious thing to do that Sakura smiles. She thinks, before she can stop herself, that if she ever lived with Sasuke, it would be a remarkably tidy house they shared. 

Sakura looks at the clock and says, “I have a shift at the hospital in thirty minutes. I should start getting ready--”

“Did anything happen between you and Naruto while I was away from Konoha?” he asks. Sasuke leans against the counter, hands in his pockets, expression blank. He looks like he doesn’t care one way or the other, but if that was true, why would he have even brought this up? And there’s something odd in his tone, a tightness of speech that betrays an undercurrent of feeling.

Sakura abandons any thoughts of politely kicking him out. She takes a deep breath, runs a hand through her hair. “A lot happened while you were gone, Sasuke-kun. It was hard, searching for you and always failing to bring you home. Especially after you joined the Akatsuki.” She looks down, studies the linoleum beneath her feet. “Naruto and I got really close, but there was nothing physical between us, if that’s what you mean.”

But this isn’t the whole of it, and Sakura forces herself to face him as she admits the rest. 

“I did tell him I loved him, once,” she says. Sasuke’s eyes narrow and the corners of his fine mouth turn down. “I was lying to myself, lying to him, even though I didn’t mean to. It was after we found out you were a criminal, and I was planning to--to attack you.” To kill him, she means, and they both know it, but Sakura doesn’t want to say that out loud. “I was trying to convince myself that my feelings for you were gone, and I thought, maybe, if I tried, I could have something with him. Because I do love Naruto, just not the way he used to want me to.”

“It wasn’t very fair of you, to jerk him around that way,” Sasuke says, but he doesn’t sound sanctimonious. If anything, it’s _relief_ she hears in his voice.

“No, it wasn’t, and I’m not proud of that.” Sakura takes a hesitant step closer to him and says, “Why do you ask?”

“I was curious.” He shrugs, but it’s too disinterested, conspicuously casual. Something about it seems false. 

Sakura suspects, the same way she can tell when patients lie about their smoking, that Sasuke is not telling her the truth. 

After he leaves, she gets ready for work, then takes the long route to the hospital. She passes civilians and off-duty shinobi. Restaurants, grocers, and houses. And as Sakura walks, the village suddenly appears bright and full of new possibility. Because she’s almost certain that Sasuke was jealous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my lovely beta, tall-girl-in-a-small-world, for her help with this chapter!


	6. Chapter 6

Two weeks without a mission. Sasuke trains, sweeps his apartment, and hectors the Hokage to change his mind. Naruto remains firm, however, and tells him to go away before he makes it three weeks. So Sasuke practices his kenjutsu and polishes his already shining furniture. By the third day he’s bored of throwing shuriken at wooden posts and there’s nothing left of his home to clean. 

So when Sakura shows up on his doorstep and asks for a favor, he’s ready to agree as long as it gives him something new to do. 

“Come in,” he says. She follows him inside and treads carefully across his floor, clearly conscientious of the recently mopped surface. Sakura always holds herself so rigidly when she’s in his house, like she’s afraid of dirtying something. 

They take seats in his living room—she on the sofa, Sasuke in the lone armchair—and he asks, “What’s this favor you need?”

“It’s my student,” she says. “Izumi is a fire type, but I really don’t know any katon jutsu. I was hoping you might teach her your fireball technique.” 

This isn’t quite what he imagined Sakura meant when she said she needed his help. He leans forward, closer to her, elbows on his knees. “It’s advanced for a genin, and it requires a lot of chakra.”

“Don’t worry there.” Sakura crosses her legs, and for a moment he follows the movement of her slim, white thighs. Sasuke forces himself to look above her neck, but the sight of her pretty eyes and pink mouth is really no less distracting. “Izumi’s greatest strength is her ninjutsu, and she’s got incredible chakra reserves. If she had red hair I’d think she was an Uzumaki.” 

“I don’t like working with children,” he says flatly. This is true, but there’s more to it. He wants to avoid taking responsibility for the welfare of young shinobi. And he has no interest in molding and teaching genin the way Kakashi tried—and failed—to do with him. 

Sakura’s shoulders slump and her expression, so animated a moment ago, falls. Every part of her seems to wilt, but her voice sounds strong and sure when she asks, “You won’t do it then?” 

“I won’t teach her,” Sasuke says. “But I will teach you, and you can pass it on to your student, if that’s what you want.”

Those pretty eyes widen, and he takes some small satisfaction from catching her off-guard. “Me?”

“Yeah, you. Is that a problem?”

“No,” she says, quickly. “It’s just, well, fire isn’t my nature type--”

“A shinobi must adapt to unfavorable circumstances,” he says. Some gem of ninja wisdom imparted by Iruka during their Academy days. 

Sakura smiles and a dimple wakes in her left cheek. “Fine then, I’m yours to command, sensei.”

It’s a joke, of course, but something about her words, light and playful though they are, put him on edge. Perhaps because, under other circumstances, Sasuke knows exactly what sorts of things he would like to order her to do. 

“When do you want to start?” Sakura asks. 

He stands and says, “Now.” 

They find a training area with wide, open spaces and a pond for her to practice over. First, he teaches Sakura the hand signs (horse, tiger, ram, monkey, boar, horse, tiger), and she copies each one as quickly as he shows it to her. Then he explains the basic steps, as his father once told him: build up your chakra, focus it to a point in your chest, and bring it up through the throat and out the mouth. 

“That part is simple enough, but mastering this jutsu is less about precision and more about fortitude and force, so it might give you trouble,” Sasuke warns. 

“Have you seen me smashing boulders?” Sakura asks. “I can do fortitude and force too.” 

He refrains from mentioning that her strength, for all its impressive appearance and destructive efficacy, is still based in masterful chakra control, and the skills it takes to accomplish are counter to the katon jutsu she’s about to learn. She knows as much anyway. 

Sakura stands on the edge of the bank, performs the seven hand signs swiftly and fluidly, takes a deep breath, and exhales a flaming sphere four or five feet in diameter. It hovers over the pond, hot enough to make the water steam, for a full thirty seconds before dissipating. 

“I did it!” Sakura says. “It wasn’t as big as the ones I’ve seen you make, though.” 

“It’s a good start,” Sasuke says. She did well, especially for someone with the wrong elemental affinity. 

He corrects her stance—“Brace your feet further apart, like this”—and steps back and watches her. At first she struggles, but the size of the jutsu increases marginally with each attempt, and within a few hours she has summoned a fireball that even his father wouldn’t have sneered at.

“You’ve got it,” he says. Sasuke feels an odd sense of pride, even though this isn’t his own accomplishment. 

Sakura smiles and says, “Thank you, Sasuke-kun. Kakashi-sensei told me this technique was a coming of age rite for your clan, so I really appreciate that you shared it.”

Strangely, it doesn’t bother him to show the Uchiha’s signature jutsu to someone outside of his family. At least, it doesn’t bother him to show it to Sakura. He trusts her, as much as he can trust anybody, and she will use it respectfully. 

“Oh, there’s something you should probably know.” She sighs and says, “Naruto is throwing you a surprise party for your birthday.”

Sasuke puts his hands in his pockets. “It’s not much of a surprise anymore,” he says. 

Sakura laughs. “Well, I thought if I gave you a heads-up, you might not kill our Hokage.” 

She thanks him again and says goodbye. Sasuke watches her leave, the Haruno circle on the back of her shirt as familiar as the girl herself. And he has the stray thought, as Sakura walks away, that the Uchiha crest would suit her. 

 

It’s seven-thirty, Sakura just finished her shift at the hospital, and she has half-an-hour to get ready. She showers, considers applying make-up, decides against it, and changes clothes twice. First she puts on the blue dress she wore in Suna, but it feels too formal. Then she tries a green blouse and grey skirt, which looks nothing short of homely when she glances in the mirror. She settles on her black dress, a knee-length number that shows off her back. 

She convinced Naruto to change the venue of Sasuke’s party from a dive bar to Tsukino’s, a calmer, more traditional establishment where people can eat decent food and drink liquor that won’t make them go blind. Sasuke’s twenty-third birthday falls on a Saturday, so the place is busy when she arrives (five minutes late, toes already hurting in too-high heels). 

Team 10 sits at the bar, the three as united in drinking as they are on the battlefield. Sakura taps Ino on the shoulder, and when her friend turns around she says, “Oh, I’m so glad you didn’t wear the blue dress. It reminds of that awful smock you used to run around in when we were genin.”

Ino’s outfit is too predictably fantastic for Sakura to disparage her attire, so she says, “Thanks, Pig,” with as much sarcasm as she can muster. “Have you seen Sasuke?” 

Ino knocks back a shot of something. “Not yet. I don’t think he’s here. Frankly, I’ll be kind of surprised if he shows.”

Sakura has already considered this possibility, and if Sasuke doesn’t arrive within fifteen minutes she plans to go to his apartment and drag him to Tsukino’s whether he likes it or not. She won’t let him skip his own birthday party. Especially when Naruto invited half the village. 

She finds Hinata with her sister, sipping the primmest alcoholic beverage Sakura has ever seen. 

“Come on, buy me a drink,” says Hanabi. “I’m a ninja, who cares how old I am?”

“I do,” Hinata says, with firm but gentle patience. She smiles when Sakura takes a seat at their table. “Hi. Are you looking for Naruto-kun?” 

“No, just good company.” And a view of the door so she can see if Sasuke comes in. “How’s Kushina?”

Hinata’s smile widens, polite greeting replaced with motherly pride. “Growing like a weed. She’s a good baby, sleeps through the night and she’s already laughing all the time. Everyone says she takes after me, but I think her disposition is all Naruto-kun.” 

“I agree,” Sakura says. “And if that’s the case, she’s going to be a handful as soon as she learns to walk.”

Hinata nods somewhat tiredly. 

The door opens, and Sakura looks up, hoping to see Sasuke, but it isn’t him. It’s Taro. 

Did Naruto invite every jounin in Konoha to this party? Does Sasuke even know Taro? Sakura still isn’t sure if they met that day at her apartment. If they had, neither man has mentioned it. 

Taro sees her, smirks, and walks over to her table. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asks. 

“Sure.” Sakura says goodbye to Hinata and Hanabi and follows Taro to the bar. She orders plain sake (no more peach flavor, not ever again). They sit, drink, and talk about trivial things. When he tries to put his hand on her thigh, Sakura brushes it aside and says, “Not here.”

“Why not?” he asks.

She sips her sake and crosses her legs. “Everyone is here, and I don’t want to advertise that I’m fucking you.” This is mostly the truth.

Taro, sleepy-eyed and shrewd, says, “Is it _everyone_ you’re worried about, or Sasuke?”

Sakura laughs, maybe a bit too lightly to sound genuine. “Why would I care about that? Besides, Sasuke isn’t even here yet.”

“Isn’t he?” He nods toward the entrance, and Sakura turns so fast that Taro laughs. Sasuke, of course, is nowhere to be seen. 

_Ino’s right, he really is a bastard._

“Funny,” she says. “Really funny, Taro.”

He gives a lopsided grin, half arrogance and half amusement. “I’m a funny guy.”

Shouts of “Happy birthday!” go up all across Tsukino’s, and this time Sasuke is actually there. So handsome it almost hurts to look at him. For some reason, he frowns when he sees her, and Sakura wonders if it’s because she’s sitting next to Taro. Does that make him jealous?

She waits until the crowd around Sasuke thins to approach him. Well-wishers go back to their food and drink, all but Naruto, who claps him on the shoulder and says, “It’s a good party, right Sasuke! I even invited—”

“All of the Leaf.” But he smiles a little as he says this. “I’m surprised you could find this many people who don’t hate me.”

“Nobody hates you!” Naruto says, but Sakura can tell his lying voice from his honest voice and she’s sure Sasuke can too.

All he says is, “Hn.” 

“Hey, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura says. “Happy birthday.”

He nods. When Naruto wanders off to play a drinking game with Tenten and Lee, Sasuke says, “This is too much fuss. Why did he invite so many shinobi?”

“Because Naruto’s idea of happiness is proportional to the number of people who approve of you?”

Sasuke takes in the packed room and says, “I need a drink.”

“Let me get it for you,” Sakura says. “You shouldn’t be buying your own liquor on your birthday. It’s some kind of universal rule, I think.”

“And take you away from your boyfriend?” Sasuke asks. “He might be offended.”

“Taro isn’t my boyfriend.”

“Your lover then.” The look he gives her is hard, unflinching, and it pisses her off.

“I know you’re not going to judge me for sleeping with someone I’m not dating. That would be hypocritical, and you’re not a hypocrite, are you, Sasuke?” He’s had sex with women before, none of them serious, none of them girlfriends. 

Sasuke shrugs and says, nonchalant, “I don’t really care who you screw.” 

“Right.” Sakura steps closer, so close that they’re nearly touching, and she almost expects him to push her away, but he doesn’t. All she can hear is music and the chatter of too many people in too small a space, and all she can see is Sasuke. Tall, blank-faced, forbidding, but still beautiful. He glances away, and it’s this small hint of nervousness that bolsters her courage. She says, “I know you’re lying. You do care who I fuck. Maybe because you wish it was you.”

He doesn’t deny this, just keeps staring pointedly at a place over her right shoulder, and Sakura’s heart beats faster, harder, because now she’s sure she isn’t making a fool of herself. She’s right. Sasuke might not love her, but he does want her.

“I’ll go home with you if you ask,” Sakura says. “All you have to do is say something.”

She turns around and, without looking back, returns to her seat at the bar.

 

He drinks with Naruto. A bad idea, because Sasuke is the lightweight of Team 7 and the jinchuriki’s tolerance is legendary. He’s careful to stop after three cups of shochu, and he orders a bowl of steamed rice to follow his liquor. While Sasuke eats, Naruto keeps going, and after two bottles of sake he starts reminiscing.

“Hey! Hey, Sasuke! D’you remember that time I used the reverse harem jutsu on Kaguya? I thought her nose was gonna start bleeding, she was so surprised.” Naruto sniggers and bangs his fist on the table.

Sasuke takes a bite of rice, swallows, and says, “It was a stupid idea. I can’t believe I agreed to it.”

Naruto smacks him on the back, and Sasuke resolves to punch him the next time he does this. “We were desperate. And it wasn’t a stupid idea. It worked, didn’t it?”

Sometimes Sasuke has difficulty believing that in another life, he and Naruto were brothers. This is one of those times. He shakes his head.

Sakura sits at the bar. The dress she’s wearing dips low in the back, and he can see the twin curves of her shoulder blades, the line of her spine. Tousled pink hair falls below her chin, and he remembers its softness from that night in Kyobetsu. She laughs at something Taro says and leans nearer to him. The other man reaches out and catches her chin playfully. Sasuke ignores this, eats his rice, pretends to listen to Naruto’s prattling. 

She invited him into her bed. He just has to tell Sakura he wants her. 

Still, Sasuke isn’t sure if he should do this. She loves him—at least, she says she does, and with one notable exception, she has never lied to him. Sakura loves him, and he does not love her back. It could ruin their friendship if they sleep together and she regrets it. 

But Sakura is a grown woman and a strong kunoichi, and she doesn’t need anyone to look out for her. He should trust that she knows her own mind and wouldn’t agree to anything she can’t handle. 

Hinata comes up behind Naruto and steals his sake. She drinks it, sets the empty cup on the table, and smiles at them so demurely that if Sasuke hadn’t seen her thievery with his own two eyes he wouldn’t have believed it. 

Naruto laughs and says, “Get your own, Hinata-chan.” 

Sasuke likes his best friend’s wife. He and Hinata don’t talk much, but they understand one another. They both come from old, proud clans, and they were both the second-best siblings whose stern fathers never let them forget their inadequacy. Forever in the shadow of a stronger sister, Hinata worked to better herself, and Sasuke knows only too well what this is like. So when she wishes him a happy birthday, he says, “Thank you,” and means it. 

“Can I borrow my husband?” Hinata asks in that quiet way she has. 

“Please,” Sasuke says. “Take him away.”

Naruto calls him an asshole, but he smiles as he says it, and goes off somewhere out of sight with his wife. 

Sakura continues to flirt with her lover and Sasuke considers ordering another cup of shochu. She glances his way—watching him the same way he’s watching her—and suddenly he’s had enough. He stands, walks to the bar, to Sakura.

“It’s the birthday boy,” Taro says, and he raises a cup of some liquor in Sasuke’s direction. He doesn’t particularly appreciate being called “boy” by a man who is no more than three or four years his senior, but Sasuke lets it go. 

He says to Sakura, “I need to speak with you. Alone.”

She nods, wide-eyed, says her goodbyes to Taro, and leaves Tsukino’s with him. It’s raining outside, a light shower that cools off the summer night, and they keep under the eaves, close to the building. Sakura stands a deliberate distance from him and asks, “What is it you wanted to say?”

Sasuke closes the space between them, tilts her chin up, and presses a kiss to her cheek. So near to her mouth that he can almost taste her, but not quite, and he understands that, whatever happens afterward, sometimes you have to grasp what you want for the simple sake of quelling desire. Because if he is honest with himself, Sasuke knows he has wanted Sakura for years, and if he doesn’t have her he may go on wanting her for a long time. 

He pulls away, and she looks dazed. Eyes heavy-lidded, lips slightly parted, as if opening for a kiss that didn’t come. Sakura touches her cheek, fingers tender, reverent, and he imagines that she is tracing the impression of his mouth. Capturing a tactile memory before the warmth of it fades. 

“Go home with me,” Sasuke says. 

Rain falls harder, slides off the roof like a waterfall a foot from them, and splashes onto the street. Lightning flashes, blue-white and brilliant, and thunder follows. Sasuke listens to the brewing storm and waits for her answer. 

Sakura takes a shaky breath, and then she says, “Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to tall-girl-in-small-world, my beta, for proofreading and reviewing this chapter. I also want to tell all the people who are reviewing how much I appreciate their feedback. It really bolsters my confidence in this story and makes me want to write more every time someone leaves a comment. So thank you so much!


	7. Chapter 7

She tastes like rice wine and she smells like rain. 

This is Sasuke’s only thought as he kisses Sakura for the first time. He can barely see her in the dark of his bedroom, but he can feel her well enough. Slender body, all kunoichi’s grace, a mixture of softness and strength. He puts his hands in her wet hair—he loves her hair and wishes he could make out the color of it, no doubt dulled from pale pink to a duskier shade in its dampness. Sasuke tilts Sakura’s head back, nips the sensitive skin of her neck, and presses a light kiss to the abused flesh. She clutches at the fabric of his shirt. 

“Turn around,” he says, and Sakura does as she’s told. He touches her bare shoulders, like he’s been wanting to do all night. Slides his fingers down her back, following her spine. Then he unzips her dress, and she takes it off. Strips down to nothing but her plain, cotton underwear. 

Sakura laughs, and the sound warms him. “If I’d known this was going to happen I would have worn fancier panties.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sasuke says. “You won’t be in them for long.” 

To prove it, he pulls her underwear down and slips a hand between her legs. She whimpers and says, “Sasuke-kun.” She’s so wet for him already, they could fuck right now and it would be good for her. He’d make sure of it. But there are other things he wants to do first. 

Sakura steps out of her panties and turns to face him. She’s naked, all slim lines and gentle curves. He cups her small, pert breasts, drags his thumbs across her nipples. She trembles and her breathing grows shallow. 

“You all right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Sakura says, and she smiles. “Just a little nervous.” 

“Why?” Both of them are experienced, and as shinobi they’ve received shots to prevent the conception of children, so there’s no need to worry about pregnancy. 

“Because it’s you,” she says. “Because I—you already know why, Sasuke.”

_Because she loves me._

Maybe it should bother or unsettle him, but it doesn’t. All he feels when he thinks about her confession is a certain sense of comfort. She’s the only person to tell him she loves him since Itachi, and there is a part of him that misses hearing it.

“Your turn,” Sakura says. “I want to see you without clothes in the way.”

Sasuke undresses quickly, and for once he lets his shirt and pants and boxers fall to the floor instead of folding them. When he stands before her, bared, he feels a strange apprehension. Not because of his nakedness; he’s confident in himself and comfortable in his body. He can’t place the source of his own hesitance. 

Her hands roam along the contours of his stomach and chest. “You’re beautiful,” she says. 

They stumble to the bed, mouths matched, all over each other. Entangled already, a mess of limbs and one-sided love. Sasuke pushes her down onto the mattress, moves on top of her, and Sakura wraps her arms around his back. Holds him to her and kisses his neck, bites his shoulder. It hurts, but only a little. A small pain that amplifies the pleasure. He touches between her legs, and she is warm and soft and, at least in this moment, his. Sakura throws her head back, breaths sharp and labored. Lightning illuminates the room and he sees the graceful line of her throat, the sweet curve of her breasts. 

It doesn’t take long, and when Sakura peaks her back arches off the bed. She grabs at the sheets and moans—a high, staggered, needy sound that drives Sasuke to slip two fingers inside her. To fill her and feel the wet quivering of her body as she comes. By the time she falls to the mattress and whispers, “Now, please, now,” he’s already opened her thighs and pressed himself against her. She slides her hands down his chest, holds his cock, guides him inside her body. 

Sasuke kisses her and pushes into her gently, testing. Kisses her again, swallowing the soft sounds she makes every time he thrusts. Her lips taste of sake and something that is purely Sakura, and she feels so good, so tight that it almost hurts, but not quite, like her nails now biting into his back. 

They move together, slow, languid, hands and mouths exploring while they (fuck, he thinks, distracted, is not the right word for what they are doing). Until slow and tender is not what he wants anymore, and Sasuke pulls away from her, out of her. Their bodies part, and Sakura asks, bereft, “Sasuke-kun, what are you—?” He turns her over, presses her down, flat against the bed. Understanding, she opens her legs, grips the sheets, and he loses no time getting inside her again.

Sasuke braces himself over her and now it’s faster, harder. Sakura’s moans are muffled by the pillow, and he doesn’t like that. So he grasps her chin, turns her face to the side, and says, “I want to hear you.” 

His breathing grows ragged as he gets closer, and he can feel the muscles in his stomach and legs tensing. He tries to slow down, to even out his rhythm and bring her to climax again, but it’s been so long, and he’s overwhelmed by the fact that this is the Sakura, the woman whose warmth he’s craved since he was boy. Pleasure coils low in his belly, spreads throughout his body, and Sasuke comes with a shudder and a half-shout. He spills himself inside her, shaking. Then, as much as he wants to collapse, he’s careful to continue holding his weight above her. 

Sasuke kisses the back of her neck, because even when he’s spent he needs to keep touching Sakura. 

Later, they lie side by side, fingers entwined, listening to the storm. Rain pounds against the roof, and once again Sasuke is reminded of Kyobetsu and the comfort he found in her arms. A different kind of intimacy than the sort they just shared, but no less potent. It scares him a little, the effect she has on him. Having sex with her was not, perhaps, a wise decision, but it is hard to make the right choice where Sakura is concerned. 

She turns on her side, drapes her arm across his chest, and asks, “What are you thinking?”

He could lie, but it seems wrong, after what they did, to be false with her. “I’m hoping this wasn’t a mistake,” he says.

Sakura lays her head on his shoulder. “Do you regret it?”

“No, but I’m afraid you might.”

She shakes her head, nuzzles his neck. Her breath is warm against his skin when she says, “I could never.” 

He feels relieved, because, whatever selfishness drove him to do this, it was not his intention to hurt her or take anything she wasn’t prepared to give. 

“I love you,” Sakura whispers, and he can tell from the tremulous tone of her voice that she’s nervous. “Can I say that? Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Sasuke plays with her still damp hair and presses a kiss to her temple. “It feels good to hear.”

He almost wishes he could say it back, if for no other reason than because she deserves to get more in return when she offers so much. Sakura’s love is not a light thing—she is as fierce in her affections as she is everything else—and he knows this, appreciates it. 

“I’m glad,” she says. “I want to make you happy, if I can. If you’ll let me.”

She said something similar the night he left Konoha. Back then, happiness was no more than a distraction from the vengeance he sought, and it was not a thing to consider. Now, although he has found a certain easiness and contentment in his simple life in the Leaf village, it seems too far out of reach to be reasonable. It would be unkind to express his doubts about this, so he keeps them to himself. 

Sakura pulls away from him, gets out of bed, and puts on her underwear. 

Sasuke sits up. “What are you doing?”

She finds her dress and says, “I, well, I thought I should go home.”

He watches her, holding the wrinkled black dress, waiting to see if he will invite her to stay. “Come back to bed,” he says. 

Sakura smiles, slips beneath the covers, and curls up by his side. They kiss until the rain stops and the sky lightens, and then, for the first time since he was a small boy, Sasuke falls asleep in the arms of someone who loves him. 

 

She wakes up in an empty bed that smells of Sasuke. Sakura stretches amidst the rumpled sheets and smiles when she thinks of the previous night. 

It’s never been like this before. Neither Hideki nor Kenji brought her any pleasure, and whatever bodily satisfaction she found with Taro was empty and unfulfilling. Sex with Sasuke was something different. Something infinitely better. 

By the bright sunlight spilling through the windows, Sakura thinks it must be at least noon. She yawns, leaves the bed, and goes to the kitchen. She finds Sasuke pouring two glasses of orange juice. He looks up, and for a moment his eyes linger on her bare breasts before shifting back above her neck.

“Morning,” she says. He nods in greeting and holds out the second glass. She takes it and drinks gratefully. Sakura is thirsty, and the juice washes the sleep taste from her mouth. 

“When do you need to be at the hospital?” Sasuke asks.

“Not until this evening. I have a night shift,” she says. “I’m training my brats at three though.”

He’s looking her up and down now, and Sakura feels herself blush, but she refuses to cover her chest. “Do you want to talk about last night?”

“What’s there to talk about?” Sasuke asks. 

“I don’t know,” Sakura says. “Maybe we should decide whether it’s all right to tell people about this.”

Sasuke shakes his head. “It’s not anyone’s business.”

“Okay.” She finishes her juice and sets the empty glass on the counter. Her hands feel empty without something to hold, and she fidgets. “Is this something you would want to do again?”

He’s silent for a long time, and right when Sakura thinks he’s not going to answer at all, he says, “Yes.”

She can’t help but smile. “Me too.”

They shower together, and it turns out that Sasuke likes the water just as hot as Sakura does. She scrubs his back and he washes her hair. The stall fills with steam, and when he starts kissing her neck, she feels lightheaded, weightless. They dry off, go back to bed, and make love again. This time with Sakura on top, straddling his hips, and it’s even better with sunlight filling the bedroom. She can see everything: lean muscles straining as he meets her movements, the sweat that beads on his skin, the way his mouth opens and his eyes close tight as he comes. 

After, they kiss, and Sakura thinks she could happily do this forever. She knows that this thing between them, whatever it is, will last only as long as Sasuke wants it to, but she resolves not to worry about that. To simply enjoy, moment by moment, this unexpected gift. 

Sakura keeps herself busy over the next few days. She shops with Ino, practices her taijutsu with Tenten and Lee, heals shinobi at the hospital, has tea with her parents, and trains her genin for the upcoming chunin exams. She tries not to want anything of Sasuke, which is for the best, because she doesn’t see him again until Wednesday afternoon. And then only because he shows up at the hospital during her shift. 

He has two broken ribs and deep bruising all over his stomach. “How did you get this?” Sakura asks. “I thought you were still suspended?”

“I am.” Sasuke winces as she examines his abdomen, checking for any signs of internal bleeding. “I was sparring with Naruto.”

She rolls her eyes. When those two fight they inevitably destroy the training ground they use and one or both of them ends up injured. “I assume you lost?” she asks. 

“No,” Sasuke says sharply. “It was a draw.” 

Sakura focuses her chakra to her hands, places them over his chest, and works on healing the fractures. “Then why isn’t Naruto here getting his bones mended?” 

“Because he’s probably at home letting his wife do it,” Sasuke says. 

“I don’t understand why you guys can’t pull your punches a little when you spar.” 

“We do.” 

She supposes that must be true. Otherwise someone would likely end up dead. 

Once she’s done, Sasuke stands up and stretches. “Thank you,” he says. “When is your shift over?”

“Six-thirty.” Sakura watches him pull his shirt over his head, perhaps less neutrally than is strictly professional. “Why?”

Sasuke stands and says, “I want to see you. Come to my apartment when you finish here.” 

The next three hours are possibly the slowest of her life. 

 

After their meeting at the hospital, Sakura’s days remain much the same. Healing, teaching her students and taking them on missions, socializing in the spare moments in between. But her nights begin to look markedly different, because she and Sasuke come to the quiet agreement that she will spend those hours with him. 

Tonight, after she finishes a short C-rank mission with Saito, Izumi, and Hachiro, she goes to Sasuke’s place. They have dinner together and he asks about her day. 

Sakura sips her tea and says, “It was fine. Our mission was pretty standard, no hiccups, just escorting some diplomat from point A to point B. What about you? What have you been up to?”

“I trained with Kakashi and Gai. Learned some new ninjutsu,” Sasuke says. “My suspension ends tomorrow, so I can get out of the village. Finally.”

Sakura sets her chopsticks down on the table. Considers whether or not to keep her thoughts to herself, and says, “Do you really dislike it here that much, Sasuke-kun?”

“There are things about Konoha that I love and things about Konoha that I hate, but this doesn’t have anything to do with that. I can’t stand being confined, being made to stay in one place, even if the place is home.” Sasuke takes a bite of rice, chews, swallows, and says, “I’m not sure you were really asking about the village.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sakura says, even though she understands him well enough. 

“It means that you were talking about yourself and not the Leaf.” Sasuke looks at her, clearly waiting to see how she will answer. 

“Maybe I was,” Sakura admits. 

His hand moves toward her, almost like he means to touch her arm, but then he draws it back. Sasuke frowns and says, “It wasn’t easy leaving you that night.”

She doesn’t need to ask which night; she knows what he’s talking about. “But you did,” Sakura says. “You left. Sometimes I wonder if you’ll do it again. Take a mission and not come back.”

Sasuke offers no explanation, no reassurances that she and Team 7 mean too much to him to abandon them again, but he says, “I won’t.” 

_Because of Itachi._ Everything always comes back to his brother. She wonders, sometimes, if he has room in his heart for anyone besides the dead. If loving the living is too precarious a notion for Sasuke to entertain. There are some things that should not be said, however, and so she does not voice these thoughts. 

They finish eating and do the dishes (this time he washes and Sakura dries).

“Let’s go to bed,” he says, and she follows him from the kitchen. 

Sasuke lends her one of his shirts to sleep in, and he surprises her by tapping her back, where the Uchiha crest is emblazoned, and saying, “It looks good on you.” 

She tells herself not to read too much into that. “Thank you.” 

They settle beneath the covers and he pulls her close. Tugs down the high collar of her borrowed shirt, kisses her neck, cups her breast, and Sakura loses herself in the feelings Sasuke awakens. They trade touches in the dark, gentle caresses, first over one another’s clothes, then under them. When he tries to slide a hand beneath her panties, Sakura catches his wrist and says, “Can we just sleep? I’m so tired.”

Sasuke nods, presses a kiss to her temple. He turns onto his side and wraps an arm around her waist. She moves closer to the warmth of his body, and says, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Sakura-chan.” 

Has he ever called her that before? She doesn’t think so.

Sakura falls asleep smiling. 

 

“Wake up.”

She stirs, stretches, and yawns. “Sasuke-kun, it’s so early.” Sakura doesn’t have to look out the window to know it’s still before dawn. 

He stands over her, fully dressed already. “I’m leaving,” he says.

Sleep-muddled and only half-awake, it takes a moment for those words to sink in. “Oh. When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what kind of mission Naruto gives me.”

“Right, of course,” Sakura says. She sits up, rubs her eyes, and smiles at him. “You’ll find me when you come home?” 

He nods and says, “Sure.” 

“Goodbye, Sasuke-kun.” She bites her lip and reaches for his hand. He lets her take it and entwine their fingers. “Be safe.” 

Sasuke squeezes her palm and says, “Goodbye, Sakura.” 

He lets go, turns away from her, and leaves. 

As soon as she hears the front door close, Sakura lies down and pulls his pillow to her chest. She buries her face in it and breathes in the warm, autumn scent that belongs to Sasuke. Like a fire burning low, down to smoke and embers. 

Sakura does not see him again for twenty-six days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my awesome beta, tall-girl-in-a-small-world. And again I want to express how encouraging comments are. Thank you to everyone who is taking the time to let me know how much they’re enjoying the fic or to leave some constructive criticism.


	8. Chapter 8

Sasuke sits in a hard wooden chair inside of Ambassador Akiyama’s hotel room. He drew first watch, so it’s his duty to wait in the dark, listening to an old man’s thunderous snores, and look out for intruders. His Anbu teammates sleep nearby, and soon one of them will wake and take his place. Sasuke has been sitting still for hours, and he is so bored that he would welcome enemy shinobi, if only for a chance to get out of this chair and do something. 

He accepted a long, B-rank mission escorting an annoying Fire Country ambassador across the five great nations for one reason only: to get some much needed distance from Sakura. He had spent the last days of his suspension with her. Sleeping together, mostly, but also talking and sharing meals. Washing dishes and training. He finds an odd sort of comfort in engaging in the most mundane activities with her. He doesn’t know what to make of this. And then there is the intensity of their sex to consider. 

Sasuke has fucked two women before Sakura. His first, Manami, was a civilian a few years his senior. They met on and off for a few months the year he turned eighteen. Theirs was a simple arrangement, pleasurable enough, and the relationship ended outside of the bedroom. Manami did not ask him about his clan or why he abandoned Konoha, and Sasuke did not ask her about the child he saw in pictures on her wall but not in her house. They parted on good terms as summer turned to autumn, and whenever Sasuke sees her around the village he nods in greeting. 

His second was over a year ago. He met Kazue at a mid-scale bar on the outskirts of Konoha. A pretty kunoichi, middling height with dull red hair and blue-green eyes. If he’s honest, her coloring and her build reminded him of Sakura. They fucked on the couch at her apartment, quick and rough, and Sasuke did her the disservice of half-imagining another woman beneath him. He isn’t proud of that, and they haven’t spoken since. 

Sasuke is no stranger to sex, but what he’s experienced with Sakura is so different from his past encounters that it’s pointless to compare them. Sometimes she touches him with reverence, like a thing nearly, but not quite, too precious to hold. Sometimes she touches him with passion, and her hunger for him, for his body, shows itself in every caress. But really, she doesn’t even have to touch him at all for Sasuke to feel her adoration and respect. Sakura’s love is evident in the curve of her smile, the upward tilt of her chin as she waits for his kiss. It’s in her eyes every time she sees him, so obvious that Sasuke wonders how he was blind to it for years. 

With Manami and Kazue it was easy to keep his emotions divorced from his body. To fuck and not want anything else. But just a few short days with Sakura, and he’s already confused. Physical intimacy feels truly intimate for the first time in his life. And after three weeks away from Konoha he’s craving her touch. Missing her bright laughter and the quiet conversation they shared over dinner.

Akiyama coughs, rolls over, and grumbles in his sleep. Then he begins to snore again. 

Anyone who believes a shinobi’s life is never dull is a fool. A ninja’s work is two parts waiting and watching to one part action, and Sasuke doubts he’s going to come across any action tonight. 

The door opens, silent on its hinges, and he turns toward it, wary and alert. Light spills into the room, across the floor, framing the shadow of a man. It’s one of the Anbu, here to relieve him. 

The shinobi wears the mask distinctive to his order, but Sasuke knows who he is regardless. Kenji walks with an arrogance of motion. He carries himself like a person who believes he cannot be killed. Sasuke does not need to use dojutsu to notice these things, and so he has no trouble identifying the man who took Sakura’s virginity and then disrespected her. 

“Your watch is up,” Kenji says. 

Sasuke stands and walks past him without saying anything. He refuses to waste his words on an idiot like this unless it’s strictly necessary. Working with him throughout this mission has tested Sasuke’s patience, since he would like nothing more than to snap Kenji’s conceited neck. 

The next day, he escorts Akiyama to the town of Nagosai, and once the ambassador is delivered safely home, he and the Anbu head toward Konoha. Back to Ichiraku ramen lunches with a knuckle-headed Hokage and nights with Sakura. 

The Fire Country is all green forest and humid heat, and they jump from tree to tree, Sasuke in the front, Kenji and his partner flanking him. The miles go by quickly, and by mid-afternoon they’re at the village gates. The two chunin posted there look at Sasuke suspiciously, as if unsure that he means Konoha no harm, before they let them through. 

They go directly to the Hokage’s tower and report to Naruto, who then dismisses the Anbu, but tells Sasuke to stay. He stands before the wide desk, hands in his pockets, tired and ready to go home. 

“So how was the Lightning Country?” Naruto asks. 

“Fine.” He had escorted Akiyama to political centers, not to any of the hidden villages, so he was never close enough to Kumo to garner the Raikage’s ire. 

“Great,” Naruto says. “Have you seen Sakura-chan yet?”

“No. I came directly here.” Why would he ask that? Did Sakura say something to him?

“Well, you should drop by the hospital and let her know you’re home.” Naruto shuffles through the mess of scrolls and papers on his desk, finds something, and signs it. Without looking up from his work, he says, “I think she’s been worried about you.”

“Sure,” Sasuke says.

He doesn’t bow and doesn’t say goodbye. He leaves Naruto’s office and heads out into the bustling streets of Konoha. When he comes to a fork in the road—one way leading toward the hospital, another to his apartment—Sasuke stops. He stands still in a sea of civilians and thinks about Sakura, waiting to hear from him. 

Sasuke finds that he wants to go to her. Rather than imposing the space he hoped for, the weeks away from Konoha have only made him miss Sakura with an intensity that troubles him. He told her he would find her when he returned from his mission, but Sasuke knows that if he does this now she will know, as soon as they touch, the desperation with which he has wanted to hold her. 

It won’t be the first promise he has broken. 

 

“Sakura, hello? Did you even hear me?” Ino asks.

“What? Sorry. Something distracted me.” Sakura gives an apologetic smile and sips her tea. It’s too hot and it burns her tongue. 

The shop Ino chose is small and modern, and everything inside seems slick, stainless steel, and meticulously clean. Sakura sits on the edge of an uncomfortable metal chair, tapping her foot to the rhythmless beat of anxiety. Decidedly not drinking the scalding contents of her pretty, porcelain cup. 

Ino rolls her eyes. “You’ve been weird lately. What’s going on with you?”

_I’ve been sleeping with the man of my dreams_. 

“Nothing,” Sakura says. “Really.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t buy it.” Ino drinks her own tea (something flowery and ridiculous in flavor, maybe hibiscus, maybe jasmine) and raises one of her fine, blonde eyebrows. Skeptical of Sakura’s bullshit, because when you’ve known one another as long as they have, it’s easy to tell when your friend is lying. 

“Are you still seeing the bastard?” Ino asks.

“No, actually.” Sakura found Taro and had a quiet talk with him a few days after she and Sasuke started seeing one another, ending things for good. He hadn’t been upset or angry. In fact, he laughed and said he understood completely. From the knowing look he gave her as they parted ways, Sakura worries that Taro may have guessed the truth of what happened after Sasuke’s birthday party. 

That isn’t a concern she plans to share with Ino, though, so instead she asks, “How’s your mom and Tetsuya?”

“Way to change the subject.” Ino props her elbows on the table and leans forward, shoulder raised in a half-shrug. “They’re fine. She really likes him and they’re always going out together.” 

“That’s nice.” Sakura blows on her tea, and her breath causes ripples to spread out across the amber surface. “Are you feeling any better about the whole thing?”

“A little,” Ino says. “He’s still not Otousan, but at least he doesn’t try to be my new father, you know? And he talks to me like an adult, which is more than my mother ever manages.”

“Tell me about it. I haven’t lived under her roof since the war ended, and Okaasan still tries to tell me how to run my life.” Sakura shuts up, remembering a little late that she shouldn’t complain too much about her parents to Ino. Since both her mother and father are still alive to complain about. 

But if this bothers her, Ino doesn’t show it. She nods and asks, “Have you seen Sasuke since he got back?”

“What? He’s home?” Sakura feels the blush blossoming in her cheeks, and she isn’t sure whether it’s from embarrassment or anger. 

“Yeah,” Ino says, casual, because she has no idea what this means. “Shikamaru told me. I figured you knew.” 

“No, I didn’t.” Sakura tries to keep her expression neutral, voice steady, but it’s hard. 

Sasuke said he would come to her when he returned to Konoha, and instead she had to find out second-hand that he’s even in the village. 

He lied to her. 

How long has he been home? A night, a week? What does this mean for the strange turn their relationship took before he left? It would be just like Sasuke to accept an extended mission on purpose, to distance himself, and then avoid her when he comes home. Like nothing ever happened. Sakura can understand if he wants to end it—she’s prepared for that possibility—but she won’t let Sasuke lie and ignore her and pretend they never slept together. 

“Are you ok?” Ino asks. She’s watching Sakura with something between concern and curiosity. 

“I’m fine,” she says, but the flush in her cheeks must give her away. 

As soon as she finishes her drink, she makes an excuse to Ino about being short on time, pays, and leaves the tea shop. She goes straight to Sasuke’s apartment—a twenty minute walk across the village, which Sakura makes in ten—and knocks on his door. Perhaps too forcefully, but she isn’t much in a mood to hide her temper. 

He answers, and if she had expected contrition she would have been sorely disappointed. Sasuke stands before her as stolid and expressionless as ever. He moves aside without speaking, and Sakura steps into his flat. It’s a little dusty, less painstakingly tidy than he prefers to keep his space, which tells her he hasn’t been home long enough to clean. 

“You lied to me,” she says, without preamble. Sakura doesn’t bother to clarify; Sasuke knows what she means. Besides, she’s almost certain he did this on purpose. 

He doesn’t apologize or deny it or offer an excuse. He doesn’t do anything except stand there, still and impassive, like some beautiful, haughty statue in the middle of his neglected living room. 

“How long have you been back?” Sakura asks.

“Since yesterday afternoon,” Sasuke says. 

“Were you going to let me know?” Part of her hopes that she’s wrong. That maybe he was just tired from his mission and hadn’t yet found time to go to her. Sakura wraps her arms around her waist and waits to see if he’ll take this out she’s offering him. 

“No,” he says, and his voice is softer now, barely audible. “I wasn’t.”

“Why? Did you not want to see me?” She braces herself for an answer she won’t like. Cruelty isn’t beyond Sasuke, though he’s only rarely been unkind to her (if you don’t count the unkindness of absence, every day for the four years that he was a missing-nin). 

He shrugs and says nothing, because when conversation grows pressing he often retreats to silence. 

“I think you’re scared,” Sakura says, and she steps closer, puts her hand on his arm. He’s warm, so impossibly warm, like there’s a fever burning under his skin. 

“Scared of what?” he asks, and there it is. That imperious tone he uses to deflect the issues he doesn’t want to face.

But Sakura is not so easily pushed away. She touches his chest, and she can feel his heartbeat under her palm. Faster than she expected from looking at him, so emotionless and cool. He’s nervous too. “This is good a thing, what we have,” she says. “And I think you’re tired of losing good things.”

For a long moment he doesn’t respond. Then Sasuke says, “What do you know about loss, Sakura? You still have your parents, your teammates, Kakashi and Tsunade.”

“I know, I’m lucky. But that doesn’t mean I can’t understand. My home was destroyed in front of my eyes. I’m a medic-nin, and I’ve seen countless men and women killed, many who I knew and cared about,” she says. “And there are different ways to lose someone besides death, Sasuke. You taught me that the night you left Konoha.”

He stiffens and says,“Naruto forgave me for that as soon as I rejoined our team, but I don’t think you ever will.”

“Naruto’s a better person than I am,” Sakura says. 

“What do you want from me?” Sasuke asks. 

“I need to know if we’re going to keep seeing each other.” She reaches out, takes his hand. “If we are, you can’t lie and you can’t run away.”

Sasuke puts his arm around her waist and pulls her against him. He cups her face, thumb caressing the curve of her cheek. “Fine.” 

They should talk more, but when he kisses her Sakura forgets what it is she needs to say. 

 

It isn’t fair, what he’s doing. Fucking the woman who loves him when he doesn’t love her back. Sasuke knows this, but he wants Sakura and he’s too selfish to give her up. 

He watches her sleep. Curled up on her side, short hair spread out across the pillow. Sasuke touches her lips. Pretty, pink, slightly parted, and he can feel her warm breath against his fingers. She had a long day at the hospital, a twelve-hour shift. She was too tired to want sex last night, but she came to him still. And now she lies here, in his bed, wearing one of his spare shirts, sleeping as easily as if she were at home. This should worry him, her comfort in his house, in his clothes. Like something of him belongs to her already. 

It should worry him, but it doesn’t. 

Dawn light peeks through the blinds. They need to get up soon, he to meet with Naruto, she to go on a short mission with her genin. But they have a little time yet, so Sasuke kisses her awake. Sakura stirs, and her green eyes open. Then she smiles against his mouth and stretches. Her slender body presses against his, taut and warm, and Sasuke rolls her onto her back.

They fuck slowly, unhurried, with Sakura’s arms wrapped around him, their bodies rocking together. He watches her. The way she bites her plump bottom lip to muffle her moans, then gasps when she can’t keep quiet any longer. She clings to his shoulders and lifts herself against him, meeting his thrusts, and it’s so sweet that it’s hard to hold back, but he does.

“Touch yourself,” Sasuke says. 

Sakura blushes, a telling rosy flush that reveals her embarrassment, but she puts her hand between her legs all the same. 

She’s beautiful when she comes, and Sasuke kisses her so he can feel her staggered cries, not unlike the tremors of her body around his cock. Then she pushes him off, onto his back, and takes him in her mouth. Sasuke threads his fingers through her soft hair, guides her movements, and soon the pleasure overwhelms him. 

Afterward, she says, “I love you, Sasuke-kun,” same as she always does, and he lets himself revel in the warmth of her words. It’s good to hear, just as good as the sex in its own way. 

Sunlight streams through the windows now, bright and unwanted. Sasuke has no desire to leave this bed. He lies beside Sakura, breathing hard, and he decides he isn’t going to meet Naruto after all. 

He props himself up on an elbow and looks at her. “Stay with me.” 

“I can’t,” Sakura says. “I told my students to meet me at the gate ten minutes from now.”

Sasuke pulls up her shirt and kisses her collarbone, breasts, and stomach. Lower and lower. He looks up at her and says, “Let them wait. It’ll teach them patience.”

“I—I’m not like Kakashi-sensei,” she says. “I shouldn’t—”

He spreads her legs and presses his lips to her inner thigh. Sasuke has never done this before, but for some reason he feels the need to taste her everywhere. 

“Stay with me,” he says again. 

Her voice breaks on his name. Even as she grips his hair and leads him closer, she says, “This isn’t fair.”

No, it isn’t.

But Sasuke has never much concerned himself with fairness and he takes what he wants anyway. 

 

“You’re late!” Izumi says. “We’ve been here for an hour.”

“I had a long shift at the hospital yesterday and I overslept.” Sakura feels guilty, lying to her genin and making them wait. But not nearly guilty enough to regret this morning. 

Their mission is simple enough: retrieve a prized sapphire necklace from the men who stole it. Izumi uses the Uchiha’s fireball jutsu on one thief, while Hachiro attacks another with gentle-fist. Saito hangs back, and when Izumi takes a mild injury he rushes forward to heal her. With a few strikes, Sakura brings down the remaining men, and they offer up the necklace, as well as a cache of other valuables they had liberated from unsuspecting people. 

Team Sakura takes the lot back to Konoha. Naruto can deal with returning the extra items to their original owners. 

“What am I gonna do with all this shit?” he asks, when she sets the bag of stolen goods on his desk. 

Sakura says, “I have no idea.”

Naruto shouts for his assistant, Cho. A rather harassed-looking young woman rushes into the office, a large stack of forms in her arms. “You called, Hokage-sama?”

Naruto waves at the sack and says, “Find out who all of this belongs to.”

She picks up the bag, careful not to drop any of the precariously balanced papers she’s holding, and says, “Yes, Hokage-sama.”

“Thanks, Cho.” Naruto turns to Sakura and says, “I’m done for the day. Wanna have dinner with me and Hinata and a really cute baby?”

“I can’t, sorry. I’ve already got plans.” She told Sasuke she would meet him at his apartment once her mission was over (and unlike some people, she keeps her promises). 

“You have plans a lot lately.” Naruto gives her a suspicious look, but he dismisses her without asking any questions.

Later that night she lies beside Sasuke, naked even though they didn’t make love again. Naked simply because he likes to touch her bare skin. “What do you want for the future?” she asks.

Sasuke slides his fingers up and down her side. Dips and rises with the slope of her waist. It’s soothing, so Sakura closes her eyes, and it’s as if all the feeling in her body is restricted to the places where he touches her. 

“To serve Konoha, to keep the village safe.” For Itachi, she knows. “Beyond that, I’m not sure. I want to restore my clan, but it’s hard for me to imagine myself married. And I don’t think I would make a good husband.”

Sasuke is taciturn, distant, mistrustful. Independent to a fault and jealous. But he’s also brave and brilliant and capable of loving more fiercely than anyone she’s ever met, save perhaps for Naruto. Sasuke might very well make a poor spouse, but he could just as easily be a wonderful husband. 

“What about you?” he asks, and there’s something careful in his tone, a forced reserve. 

_I used to dream about being your wife_ , she thinks. _I used to hope for a future beside you_.

“Well, I’ll continue my work at the hospital and keep going on missions. Hopefully, I’ll see my students make chunin, maybe even jounin someday,” Sakura says. “And I want to be married, but—” She falters, takes a breath. “But only to someone I love.”

Sasuke doesn’t say anything to this. He pulls her closer, kisses her temple. 

He falls asleep beside her, but Sakura remains awake and she allows herself to really think about what she’s doing. Fucking a man who will never love her. Playing house and sneaking around, not telling anyone, and why does he want to keep it such a secret? Is he ashamed of her? Or is it simply Sasuke’s obsessive need for privacy? Regardless, she knows this is a bad idea. Heartbreak waiting to happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my incredible betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass for all their help. Thanks to these lovely ladies this chapter isn't a hot mess. I also appreciate all the comments on this story. Every time I get an update with a new message it brightens my day. :)


	9. Chapter 9

Naruto summons both Sasuke and Sakura to the Hokage’s tower on a bright Tuesday morning, and for a moment she thinks he has somehow figured out that his teammates are sleeping together. But Sakura knows her worries are baseless as soon as she enters the meeting chamber and sees Ino, Shikamaru, Lee, Kakashi-sensei, Shino, Kurenai, Hanabi, and other jounin. If Naruto wanted to confront them he wouldn’t invite a cohort of Konoha’s elite ninja to witness it. 

“What do you think this is about?” she asks Sasuke. 

He says, “Probably the chunin exams. There was something similar last year right before we went to Iwa.” He frowns, brows drawing closer together over his eyes, and the expression is so familiar and so Sasuke that Sakura nearly smiles in return. He asks, “Why haven’t you been part of the exam entourage before?”

“Tsunade wouldn’t let me. She said I was too valuable a medic to remove from the hospital for so long unless it was for a mission where there might actually be some bloodshed.” Sakura rolls her eyes and wonders once again whether her shishou will return to Konoha. “I guess that hasn’t occurred to Naruto, so don’t tell him. I’d love to go to Kiri. Never been before.” 

Sasuke lifts one shoulder in a dull shrug and says, “The Water Country is nothing special.”

“You’ve been there?”

He nods. “I traveled quite a bit with Orochimaru.”

“Oh,” Sakura says, because she’s always unsure of how to react whenever his time as a missing-nin comes up in conversation. 

“It’s all mist and ocean and some strange shinobi who look half-fish.” Then Sasuke smirks and adds, “Like Suigetsu.” 

“Do you miss them?” she asks. “Your other team, I mean?”

To Sakura’s knowledge, Sasuke hasn’t seen Juugo, Suigetsu, or Karin since the war ended and he returned to Konoha.

“Not really.” 

Although his expression remains impassive, Sakura suspects he may not be telling the truth. She’s learning that there is often a world of difference between what Sasuke thinks and what Sasuke says. Despite his facade of coldness, he is, in truth, a man of great passion. Whether it’s love or anger, lust or hatred, he feels fully and deeply. She imagines it must be exhausting, keeping such turbulent emotions in check all the time. 

A few more jounin join their group, and then Naruto calls out over the tired, early morning chatter for everyone to sit down. The room fills with the scraping sound of wooden chair legs on stone as a dozen-odd shinobi find seats at the large, rectangular table. Sakura claims the spot next to Sasuke and assures herself that this doesn’t look odd. He is her teammate, after all. 

Kakashi-sensei sits to her right. She can’t see his mouth, but Sakura can tell from his eyes that he’s smiling when he looks at her. 

“I hear you have genin almost as difficult as mine were,” he says.

“Very funny. And no, not nearly.” Her students haven’t given her half the grief Team 7 gave Kakashi. “Izumi’s a handful. Saito is full of himself, though with good reason. And Hachiro needs a little extra attention, but he’s going to make a great shinobi someday.” 

“Sounds familiar,” Kakashi says. “It’s too bad—”

Exactly what is too bad, Sakura doesn’t find out, because Naruto shouts, “Hey! Everybody pay attention to me.”

Sasuke leans over and says to her, “I guess some things never change.” 

Sakura coughs over a laugh and looks up at her friend. Naruto sits at the head of the table and says, “You’re probably all wondering why you’re here—”

“Not really,” Ino says around a yawn. “Chunin exams again, right?”

“Oh. Well, yeah, but—”

Whatever he’s trying to say gets drowned out by more chatter. Kurenai laughs at something Shikamaru tells her, Anko flirts with the men on either side of her, and Ino and Hanabi start gossiping. Naruto turns red. He’s a new Hokage, the youngest Konoha has ever seen, and an informal one. It’s going to take time for him to establish his authority, Sakura knows this, but all she can see is her friend: twelve years old again, being ignored by the people whose respect he so desperately wants. 

“Hey!” Sakura yells. “Shut up! The Hokage is talking.”

The room goes quiet and Naruto smiles. “Thanks, Sakura-chan. Anyway, like I was saying, the chunin exams are in ten days, and I’ve chosen you guys to escort me to Kiri. Technically, you’re my guards, but it’s the genin who will really need protection…”

 

They’re in bed together when Sasuke says, “I think it would be best not to see each other while we’re in the Mist.” 

Sakura props herself up on an elbow and frowns. “Why not?”

No doubt the Mizukage’s administration will provide all the Konoha shinobi with quarters at the same inn, just as the Tsuchikage’s aides did last year in Iwa. Ninja or not, it would be difficult to hide sneaking in and out of each other’s rooms with their peers all around. This is what Sasuke tells Sakura, but his reasoning sounds weaker out loud than he imagined it would. Maybe because he’s lacking conviction. 

“Are you sure? We could be in Kiri for weeks.” Sakura runs her fingers up and down his chest. A small seduction—whether inadvertent or calculated, he can’t tell. 

Sasuke says, “Yes,” and her touch stills over his heart. She pulls her hand away. 

“Do you really care so much about what people would think?” Sakura’s tone is studied and careful, like her question is almost too delicate to ask. 

“No. But this is between us and I want to keep it that way.” 

“Fine,” she says, though it’s obvious that she’s dissatisfied with his answer. 

They spend more time together than usual in the days leading up to chunin exams. Frequent visits to one another’s apartments become nightly. And when he turns down a short A-rank mission to Sound, Sasuke tells himself it’s because he’s tired, if he never sees that place again it will be too soon, and he doesn’t want to chance missing the beginning of the exams if the mission runs long. 

The evening before Leaf ninja set out for Kiri, Sasuke goes to Sakura’s flat. As soon as he walks inside, she pushes him against the front door and kisses him. She tastes warm, all cinnamon tea and heat. Sakura slides her hands underneath his shirt, touches his stomach with possessive authority, and as quick as that he wants her. They don’t make it to the bed. They barely make it to her living room couch, where he presses her onto the faded blue cushions. He pulls at her clothes and she pulls at his until his pants are down and her skirt is up and Sakura’s underwear are twisted in his fist. When he isn’t watching the woman beneath him—her pale eyes grown a shade greener in passion, a subtle change only he would notice—Sasuke looks at the token he holds in his hand. White cotton panties striped with candy pink. 

Afterward, they lay there, bodies still joined, and Sakura whispers, “I’m going to miss you.” 

He could say it back, and it would be true, but Sasuke doesn’t say anything.

The next morning he and Sakura part ways, even though they’re going to the same place. He takes his time, so he shows up at the village gate a full five minutes behind her. When he arrives she’s laughing with Ino, and she seems so young when she smiles. Like the girl he knew from their adolescence. At a glance she appears too sweet to be a kunoichi—an illusion dispelled once she’s on the battlefield. And that has never changed, not really. Sakura remains a study in contradictions. A healer with monstrous strength, as expert at breaking bones as she is at mending them. Gentle one moment and fierce the next. A calm, level-headed woman until you awaken her hot temper. 

She tucks a lock of pink hair behind her ear, glances away from Ino, and catches his eye. Sakura’s smile fades from bright to soft, from public to private. Something for him alone, despite the company they’re in. 

The Hokage, thirteen jounin, and a crop of Konoha’s genin, as young as they are nervous, leave Konoha just as dawn breaks over the horizon. 

It takes most of the day to make it the port city of Shizugata, where a harried captain takes their group of shinobi aboard his ship. The _Ryujo_ departs in the late afternoon, when the sun is high overhead but listing toward the west. The first mate promises that they will be in the Water Country by tomorrow night. 

Sasuke doesn’t like boats. He discovered this years ago during his travels with Orochimaru, and it’s as true today as it was when he was fourteen. The endless, depthless blue of the ocean inspires no feeling in him, and he hates the cramped quarters, the forced interaction with other passengers. At least he doesn’t suffer from seasickness like Hanabi, who spends their first evening on the _Ryujo_ emptying her stomach. 

Sasuke finds Naruto at the bow of the ship, standing up on the railing in a way that probably isn’t safe. He’s grinning and pointing at the pelican that flies overhead. “Hey, Sasuke!” he shouts. “Do you see that bird? It just scooped up a fish right out of the water.”

Sasuke grabs Naruto by the back of his jacket and pulls him down to the deck. “Don’t make Hinata a widow by falling off the boat, dobe.” 

Naruto laughs and says, “Are you worried about my safety, Sasuke?” 

“It would embarrass Konoha if our Hokage drowned to death.” 

“Right,” Naruto says, still smiling. “Wanna spar?”

“And destroy this ship?” Sasuke asks. “I don’t think the captain would appreciate that.” 

“We could fight on the water. It’d be like the Valley of the End, except this time I’ll win and you won’t be going anywhere.”

It’s a stupid, foolhardy idea, as Naruto’s plans often are. They’ll have to catch up with the boat in the dark when they’re done, and if either of them are injured no one will be around to heal them.

But Sasuke has a hard time backing down from a fight with Naruto, so he says, “Fine. Let’s go.”

He summons chakra to the soles of his feet—a task so second-nature now that he can’t remember why it once gave him such trouble—and jumps overboard. Sasuke lands on the surface of the water, beside the ship. He gives the hull a wide berth and heads toward the stern, then past it, into the open space behind the _Ryujo_. Naruto follows him, and then they square off, facing one another with nothing between them but rolling waves of blue. 

Sasuke draws his katana and runs at Naruto, who pulls a kunai. The screech of steel on steel fills the air as the two blades meet, part, and meet again. He’s better with ninja tools than Naruto, always has been, and within a minute he has Konoha’s greatest Hokage scrambling backwards, doing his level best just to keep Sasuke at bay. 

Naruto grunts, pockets his kunai, and quickly performs the hand seals for his shadow clone jutsu. A dozen identical Narutos bombard Sasuke from all sides, and he has to awaken his Sharingan to keep track of them all. Suddenly the world is alive with new color and depth, and he sees where only moments before he might as well have been blind. He cuts through one clone, kicks another, elbows a third, and the doppelgangers disappear in puffs of smoke. Sasuke fights off more of them, but they just keep coming. He jumps away and summons his clan’s signature fireball jutsu. Clones burn away beneath the flames, and steam rises from the surface of the sea. The real Naruto dodges the attack. 

If this were a true battle, Sasuke would infuse his sword with chidori and run his opponent through with it. But this is only a spar, and he and Naruto established ground rules for their fights years ago. Sasuke will not use chidori or any ocular powers beyond his basic Sharingan, and Naruto will avoid senjutsu, the rasengan, and any of his abilities as a jinchuriki. 

Now they turn to taijutsu. Naruto lands a sharp kick to his stomach, and Sasuke falls back, winded. He forces himself to ignore the blunt pain in his abdomen, to focus. He’s still faster than Naruto, still has the advantage of the Sharingan. He presses forward, overwhelming his friend with kicks and punches. 

Sasuke attacks with a confidence of motion, and he knows with the certainty borne from endless practice that today he’s going to win. 

 

Sakura is sitting on the deck, enjoying the salt-scented breeze, braiding Ino’s long, blonde hair when she hears it. The unmistakable sound of Naruto and Sasuke shouting as they wreck their surroundings with jutsu. The ship rocks from the force of the upset water, and she has to grab the railing to keep from falling. 

“What the hell was that?” Ino asks. 

“Morons,” Sakura says. She stands up and looks out over the ocean. Her teammates are maybe ten yards away from the stern, running toward one another on the water. 

Kakashi walks over, unhurried as ever, hands in his pockets. “What do you think, Sakura? Should we stop this or not?”

She looks up at her sensei. There are lines beginning to furrow the skin beside his dark eyes now, and she wonders if there are other signs of age hiding beneath his mask. He remains as inscrutable as always, but Sakura is sure he must be as tired of chasing Naruto and Sasuke as she is. 

“Just let them have it out,” Sakura says. 

The boat goes on, steaming ahead, and she watches the distance between herself and her teammates widen, leaving the men—no, the boys—behind. 

She doesn’t see either of them again until after sunset. She retires early, exhausted from the long day of travel. Her little cabin has two beds, but the second remains empty; Ino is her bunkmate, and her friend prefers to sleep with Shikamaru. 

Sakura has already changed into her night clothes when she hears her door open. Only one person would be bold enough to enter her room without knocking, and she recognizes the familiar, measured fall of his footsteps as well. Sasuke.

“Will you heal me?” he asks.

Before she can answer, he closes the door, takes off his shirt, and sits on the edge of her bed. He clearly assumes that she won’t say no. 

“I shouldn’t,” Sakura scolds. She puts her hands on her hips, mostly to keep them from straying to the fresh bruises blooming across his torso. “You deserve every injury.” 

“Hn.” Sasuke looks at her, unimpressed and expectant. 

She sighs and rolls up her pajama sleeves. Sakura can’t turn away a patient, and no matter how annoyed she might be with him she could never refuse to help Sasuke. So she stands in front of him, focuses her chakra to her hands, and places them over the contusions on his chest and stomach. She feels for cracked ribs or internal bleeding and finds nothing. Not even a hairline fracture. And the bruises aren’t deep, the damage limited to his skin and the tissue beneath, not settled into the muscle or bone. Really, his injuries are light for a battle with Naruto. 

“You won, didn’t you?” she asks.

Sasuke’s lips upturn in the smallest of smiles. “Yes.”

It only takes a few minutes to heal him. She’s surprised he bothered to come to her at all, with injuries this minor. 

“There. You’re good as new.” 

“Thank you,” he says. 

Those words inevitably remind her of the night he left Konoha, but instead of being angry or resentful all Sakura feels is a certain contentment. Sasuke so rarely shows gratitude, and she is one of the few people he ever expresses it to. 

“You’re welcome,” she says. 

He stands, and their bodies are close enough that if this were anyone but Sasuke she would feel the need to take a step back. But she doesn’t move, and he puts his hands on her waist, pulls her against him.

“Ino could come back,” Sakura says. 

This is doubtful, though, and Sasuke must know that. He trails kisses down her cheek, her jaw, her neck. Nips at the sensitive skin of her throat and begins unbuttoning her pajamas. 

“I thought—” Sakura takes a deep breath when he opens her shirt enough to cup her breast. “I thought we weren’t going to see each other in Kiri.” 

Sasuke picks her up, lifting her into his arms with ease, and drops her on the mattress unceremoniously. He takes off his shoes, pants, undershorts. Naked and lean and beautiful, he joins her in the little bed. Sakura can’t help but touch him, can’t help but want this man. 

Sasuke kisses her, then says, “We’re not in Kiri yet.” 

They don’t sleep much that night. 

Sasuke sneaks out of her cabin just before sunrise, and Sakura spends most of the voyage to the Water Country in bed, resting. The _Ryujo_ docks at seven o’clock, and then the Konoha shinobi set out for Kiri. 

The journey from the coast to the hidden village is a short one, and when they arrive one of the Mizukage’s aides, a tall green-haired man named Noburu, greets them at the gate. He looks to be part harried assistant and part shark, and Sakura wonders what exactly it is that they do to their people in Kiri to give them such unusual appearances. Night fell some time ago, and between the darkness and the ever present mist, she can see little of the village. Columned stone buildings, green vegetation, shinobi and civilians walking the streets. The air feels damp and cool, clammy against her skin, and Sakura doesn’t like it. She prefers the warmth of Konoha, even the arid heat of Suna. 

Noburu leads them through the heart of the village to a ryokan. The large, rather traditional looking inn reminds Sakura of a grander version of the minshuku she and Sasuke shared that night in Kyobetsu. She wonders if Sasuke is also thinking of their last mission together: the pounding rain, that cramped little bed, his nightmare. She can’t begin to guess what the dream was about. So much of Sasuke’s life must haunt him, and she has no way of knowing which demons were on his doorstep in Kyobetsu.

There have been other nights since then, of course. Other nightmares. Sakura always wakes Sasuke from whatever past terror has him in its thrall. Holds him and kisses him and promises that it’s over, that it wasn’t real, until he calms. They never talk about these things the next morning, just like they do not discuss their relationship. 

After she unpacks her bag, Sakura runs hot water into the ofuro, strips, and steps into the wooden tub. She watches steam rising off the surface of the bath, allows herself to soak in its warmth, and thinks about Sasuke. His room is two floors below hers, so far away that she has no excuse to even visit his hall. Maybe she could convince him to chance it, to come see her anyway like he did last night on the ship. Sakura still can’t believe he did that. She’s almost certain that he only came to her with his injuries, slight as they were, as a ploy to get inside her cabin, to make love with her. Regardless of his intentions, it was risky and reckless, utterly unlike Sasuke, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. 

 

Genin from all the competing hidden villages are swept away by Kiri proctors to take their individual tests early the next morning. The nature of the assessments are kept secret, so that any jounin with testing students cannot leak information to their genin. Dishonesty and deception always run rampant in any ninja examination, and Sasuke is certain that Sakura was the only shinobi from his first chunin exam who passed the written test without cheating. He doubts things will be much cleaner here, no matter what precautions are taken. 

The first day of the exams leaves the Hokage’s escorts with little to do in the way of official business, so they split up to explore the Mist Village. Sasuke joins Team 7 in their tour of Kiri. Naruto rushes ahead of the group, pointing at landmarks and stopping by vendors’ stalls to buy knickknacks. Sasuke hangs back, listening to Kakashi and Sakura discuss her students’ chances in the exams.

“Izumi has the best shot of making chunin,” she says. “She’s well ahead of the boys in terms of ninjutsu and taijutsu. Besides, Hachiro’s nerves might get the best of him, and you know it’s harder for medic-nin like Saito to get promoted.”

Kakashi shakes his head. “She’s still going to have a rougher time of it than they are. Examiners are harder on girls. There are plenty of old-fashioned shinobi who think kunoichi have no place on the battlefield.” 

“You think I don’t know that?” Sakura asks. “I’m a woman _and_ a medic-nin. I understand how hard it is. But Izumi is that one in a dozen genin who actually has the skill to pass her chunin exam the first time around.” 

Kakashi shrugs. “Don’t underestimate the power of ignorance. If she’s promoted I’ll be surprised.” 

“You’re always surprised when anyone is promoted,” Sasuke says. 

Kakashi laughs. “That’s true. Honestly, this batch of kids is too green, too young. I wouldn’t pass any of them.”

Sakura smiles at their sensei and says, “If you had your way, the three of us would be eternal genin.”

“Well, Sasuke and Naruto were well on their way. Seventeen is a pitiful age to make chunin—”

“Hey!” Naruto shouts. “I was kinda busy learning with Pervy Sage and saving the damn world to take my test on time.” 

“Yes, and Sasuke was becoming an international criminal.” Kakashi says. “I know.”

Sakura and Naruto look at Sasuke, obviously nervous, waiting to see how he will answer this. If they’re waiting for a temperamental response, then they’ll be disappointed. It’s lies Sasuke takes offense to, not the truth. 

Naruto sniffs out a restaurant that serves ramen, and the four of them get lunch together. It’s the first time Sasuke has spent with the rest of Team 7 since he and Sakura started sleeping together. He isn’t worried about this—Naruto is too oblivious and Kakashi too disinterested to notice anything different—but he can tell from the pointed way that Sakura refuses to meet his eyes that she’s a little anxious. 

Kakashi sits next to Naruto, leaving the opposite side of the booth to Sasuke and Sakura. There’s no option but to sit close together, and by the time their waitress comes to serve them, he’s beginning to realize that this is going to be harder than he anticipated. Sakura looks beautiful when she laughs, looks beautiful when she scowls, and he has the sudden urge to put his arm around her shoulders. He doesn’t, but throughout the entire meal he ignores the need to touch her. Fights the desire to make a public claim that this woman belongs to him. 

Sasuke eats little and says less and by the time the bill arrives, he realizes that things may have become more complicated than he expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me more trouble than the first eight combined. I couldn’t have turned it into something decent without the help of my wonderful betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass. So thank you to my betas, and thank you to everyone who’s been giving me feedback!


	10. Chapter 10

As is typical, the second stage of the chunin exams is a survival test. Three-man teams are split up and released one by one into a densely wooded training ground that Sakura can’t help but notice is not unlike the Forest of Death. Izumi and Hachiro fight their way to the central fort within the allotted time, but Saito fails to arrive there within twelve hours. And so two of her genin are cleared to compete in the final tournament. 

This year, the Kiri proctors give the participating shinobi three weeks to prepare for their matches. Sakura spends most of her days training Izumi, Hachiro, and Saito, teaching new jutsu and drilling them on old techniques until they are executed perfectly.

“Why do I have to do this?” Saito asks. “I didn’t even pass the second test.” 

Today they are learning nature type ninjutsu. Wind for Hachiro, fire for Izumi, water for Saito. 

“You’re a good shinobi, and you know it,” Sakura says. “But you expected to win on talent alone and you got lazy preparing for these exams. You need to practice harder than ever so you can pass next time.” 

“If I do a good job, will you teach me how to fight like you do?” he asks. 

Sakura smiles. “If you master this jutsu, I promise I’ll start training you in chakra-increased strength as soon as we get back to Konoha.” She claps him on the shoulder, and Saito nods.

Izumi takes to her new fire ninjutsu with ease and great capability. Saito does nearly as well with the water whip Sakura teaches him. Hachiro struggles with his elemental technique, but he practices for hours after his teammates abandon the training ground, and by mid-afternoon he’s mastered the whirlwind. 

Sakura escorts her student back to the ryokan, and as they walk, Hachiro asks, “Do you think Okaasan will be proud of me for making it to the final tournament? Even if I don’t get promoted?” 

Sakura wants to tell Hachiro his mother will appreciate his accomplishments no matter what. She wants to say this, but the truth is that Hyuuga Suzuki is a difficult woman to please, and if her son fails his chunin exams she will be disappointed in him. 

“Don’t worry about what your mother thinks,” Sakura says. “What matters is that you have pride in yourself.” 

This is a lesson she had to learn. It took time, but Sakura realized she didn’t need approval or acknowledgement from her sensei, shishou, or parents. Not even from the boy she loved. To be a strong shinobi, she had to believe in her own abilities. 

Hachiro bows his head so miserably that she knows her words are falling on deaf ears. When they reach the inn, Sakura praises Hachiro on his hard work today, then heads to the fourth floor. 

On the way up the narrow staircase, she nearly runs right into Sasuke. 

“Sorry,” Sakura says, and she can feel the flush rising in her cheeks. It’s been over two weeks since they made love on the ship. Whatever desire possessed him to have her in her cabin that night, she doesn’t know, and it hasn’t resurfaced since then. Sasuke treats her with cool reserve, a contrived distance. He barely interacts with her even when Team 7 reunites to share a meal or tour Kiri. Sakura doesn’t know if this is simply his way of avoiding their peers’ suspicions, or if something is wrong. 

Now she steps to the side so that Sasuke can get by. He walks past her without saying a word, but at the last moment Sakura reaches out and catches his hand. Entwines her fingers with his, like they’ve done countless times since his birthday. 

Sasuke looks at her. Right eye dark and familiar, left eye awake with the ringed rinnegan that she’ll never get used to. “What?” he asks. 

Sakura has spent her afternoons and evenings wandering Kiri. Finding bars, restaurants, and vendors to frequent throughout her stay in the Mist. And if she looked at inns, hostels, and hotels, she supposes that speaks to a certain weakness she can’t seem to overcome.

“There’s a minshuku on the east edge of the village,” she says. “It’s on Yagami Street, between a weapons shop and a library, and the roof is painted blue.” 

Sasuke frowns and asks, “Why are you telling me this?” 

He’s so close. Close enough to kiss. 

“Because I want you to meet me there tonight,” Sakura says. 

He squeezes her hand, hard, but not painfully so. “We agreed not to see each other while we were here,” he says evenly.

“We did. But I miss you.” She steps nearer, until their bodies are touching and she can kiss his neck. This is stupid, public, anyone could see, but Sakura can’t manage to care. She whispers in Sasuke’s ear all the things she will do for him if he meets her at midnight. 

“Sakura,” he says, and his voice sounds harsh but needy. A warning and a plea tangled together. 

“Don’t you want me, Sasuke-kun?” She leans back against the wall, and she can just see the picture she’s making: pink hair tousled from work with her genin, eyes heavy-lidded, legs and lips slightly parted, inviting. “Because you can have me if you do.” 

He wants to kiss her, wants to fuck her, she can see it in his expression, suddenly heated and hungry. 

Sasuke lets go of her hand with practiced ease and says, “Fine. Midnight, then.” 

 

Sasuke leaves the ryokan at five minutes to twelve. Later than he ought to have set out, because he spent the last hour debating whether or not to meet Sakura at all. They decided to spend this time apart, and things have become complicated enough without adding a midnight rendezvous. 

Over the last two weeks he has built a deliberate wall of silence between himself and Sakura. And when she breaks through he gives only curt responses. Not angry or resentful, merely concise and colorless. The kind of words you would speak to a stranger instead of a lover. He knows—has known for a long time, if he’s honest—that he wants more from her than just sex. He tried to tell himself that if he fucked her then that would satisfy him. It would be enough. Now he understands how foolish that was. How ignorant, because he hadn’t yet learned the subtle curve of her hip and the slope of her breast, the beauty nestled in the valley between her shoulder blades. Sakura has educated him in the practice of making love, and far from satisfying him, it has only made him want more. More of her time, more of her affection. Things Sakura would willingly give—if he asked for them. 

He can imagine what might happen if he told her the truth. They would start seeing one another openly, for all of Konoha to witness. Dinners become dates, and Sakura embeds herself deeper into his life. Comes home to him every day, sleeps in his bed, wears his clothes, until her things start to appear in his apartment. Not so different from what they’re doing now, really, except that there would be expectations and rules, and Sasuke isn’t ready for the responsibility of being a partner. 

As a boy he lived his life with a purity of purpose; everything came back to vengeance. Then after the war, he dedicated himself to Itachi’s dream, to protecting Konoha. Sasuke has always been self-centered, forever making the choices that best served his ambitions. He doesn’t know how to be any other way. And the part of him that could love without reservation died with his clan. 

While he’s working these things out, he should stay away from Sakura. Her presence muddles his judgement. But when he thinks of her sitting in a room all alone, Sasuke knows he can’t lie and leave her waiting. Not again. 

Besides, it has been fourteen days since he last kissed her. 

The village is dark and quiet. Civilians and shinobi alike are in bed at this hour. Mist shrouds the roads and buildings, spectral in the moonlight. Yagami Street is located in one of the oldest sections of Kiri. Restaurants here serenade their customers with the shamisen, and inns cater to the traditional. He finds the blue-roofed minshuku bookended between the weapons shop and the library, just as Sakura said it would be. 

A woman sits behind the front desk, wrinkled, white-haired, and grandmotherly, wearing a green yukata.

“I’m meeting someone here,” he says.

“Name?” 

“Haruno,” Sasuke tells her. 

“Ah, yes,” says the woman. “She’s in room 201.”

He takes the stairs up to the second floor landing, slides open the first door on the left, and sees Sakura sitting on the futon, reading a book. He’s late, maybe by as much as a quarter-hour, but she only smiles at him and says, “Sasuke-kun. You’re here.”

She sounds surprised that he came, and he supposes that’s fair, since he almost didn’t. 

Sasuke takes off his shoes and sets them neatly by the door. He walks to the bed, and when Sakura closes her book, he sees from the cover that it’s a very battered copy of _Icha Icha Paradise_. 

“Is that Kakashi’s?” Sasuke asks. 

Sakura laughs and sets the paperback aside. “Yeah. I picked his pocket earlier today, just to see if I could.”

“I take it he didn’t catch you.” Sasuke comes closer, sits next to her on the bed. 

“Our sensei is getting old and slow,” she says. “I’ll give his book back tomorrow.” 

He cups her cheek, leans over and kisses her. A light meeting of lips, until Sakura opens her mouth to him. He puts his hand on her thigh, slides it under her skirt. Instead of finding cotton or lace, as he expected, Sasuke touches only the softness of Sakura. He breaks the kiss and looks at her. She blushes under his hard stare and gives him a gentle smile. Then she straddles his lap, unzips her shirt, pulls her skirt up around her waist. Now he can see what he felt a moment ago: she isn’t wearing any panties (and Sasuke thinks if he married another woman and fathered children and lived to be a hundred he would still never forget this sight). 

He wants her with the same kind of single-mindedness with which he once wanted revenge. Intensely and to the exclusion of all else. Not just her body; that’s only the basest part of Sakura that he desires. Sasuke needs everything from her, and he doesn’t know why or when this happened, but he has to put a stop to it. 

So when she tries to kiss him, he deftly avoids the contact, and when she tugs at his shirt, he stills her hands and says, “Don’t bother.” 

He moves to undo his pants, but Sakura catches his arm and asks, “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing.” He can hear the flatness of his own voice, the insincerity and indifference, and Sakura must too, because she’s frowning now, brows drawn closer together over her pale green eyes. 

“Be honest,” she says. “Please.” 

Sasuke flips her onto her back, yanks her shirt open wider, and bends to take the nipple of one small breast into his mouth. She cards her fingers through his hair, whimpers his name. He thinks the matter is settled, that there will be no more talk, but when he releases her, Sakura scrambles backward, away from him, and crosses an arm over her bare chest. She’s pink-cheeked, flushed with want. “Something’s different,” she says. “ _You’re_ different.”

“Do you want to do this or not?” he asks.

Sakura reels as if he slapped her. “Is that all that matters to you? Is that all you came here for? To have sex?”

“That’s all there is between us,” Sasuke says, and maybe this isn’t true yet, but it needs to be. 

“Oh.” She sounds so lost and hurt that he almost wants to take back his words. Sakura closes and zips her shirt with trembling hands. Tugs her skirt back down over her hips, straightens it. She stands, smooths her hair, and says, “I’m not much in the mood anymore. I’ll—I’ll see you around, Sasuke-kun.”

She picks up Kakashi’s book, opens the door, and walks out.

He sits alone in the rented room long after she leaves, nearly certain he did the right thing, but regretting it all the same. 

 

Sakura wakes up late, head pounding. She cried all night in the privacy of her room, curled up on her side, arms wrapped around a plump, goose down pillow. Now her face feels swollen and tender, and every heartbeat sends a sharp throb of pain to her temples, behind her eyes. She pulls the blanket up over her head, warding away the morning light (which is dull and grey, because this is Kiri, but it’s still too bright for her to stand just now). 

She hears Sasuke’s words again, as plainly as if he were here with her, saying that the only thing between them is sex.

And isn’t that what she’d asked for, when she propositioned him at his birthday party? How had she been stupid enough to get her hopes up, to allow herself to expect anything more from him? They never discussed the particulars of what they were doing, but she knew very well that Sasuke didn’t want a relationship. So why had it been so painful to hear what she already suspected? 

Sakura drags herself out of bed, washes her face, and glances in the mirror. She looks every bit as awful as she feels, and worse, it’s obvious that she cried herself to sleep last night. She can only hope that she doesn’t run into Sasuke. 

Sakura manages to avoid him, but she isn’t three steps outside of the inn when Naruto puts his hand on her shoulder and asks, “What’s wrong, Sakura-chan?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” A lie if she’s ever told one, but she can hardly confide in Naruto today. 

He frowns, confusion and concern clearly written across his face. So open and so different from Sasuke’s subtly shifting expressions. “You don’t have to lie to me,” Naruto says. “Whatever it is, I can help. That’s what friends are for, right?”

Sakura gives him a weak smile. “There’s nothing you can do. Not this time.” 

She leaves him and heads toward the training grounds, where Izumi, Hachiro, and Saito are waiting for her. 

The next several days go by quickly. Sakura trains her genin, shepherds Naruto to functions with the Mizukage and her administration, and avoids Sasuke. Still, she sees him twice. Once while serving as the Hokage’s escort, and again when Team 7 goes out for dinner. She’s thankful, for the first time since arriving in Kiri, that Sasuke’s room at the ryokan is so far apart from hers. 

The third stage of the chunin exams begins on a morning just as misty and cool as the days that came before it. Sakura sits next to Naruto in the stands reserved for the Hokage and his Konoha jounin. She expects Sasuke to take the place on Naruto’s other side, but instead he sits by her. 

She hates herself a little for the way her heart begins to beat faster. As awful as their last confrontation was, she misses him. She always misses him when they’re apart for long. 

The first few rounds pit genin from Kiri and other hidden villages against one another. Five of Konoha’s shinobi made it to the final rounds, but their matches are further down the line. She should pay attention—the chunin exams are an opportunity to see their competitors’ new blood, to gauge the potential of the next generation—but all Sakura can think about is Sasuke, sitting so close to her that their shoulders brush. She can feel the warmth radiating off of him and smell the woodsmoke scent that clings to his clothes. It hurts, almost, to be right next to this man that she loves. 

_That’s all there is between us_. Only sex.

He just wants the comfort of her body. Someone to fuck and sleep beside and help keep the nightmares at bay. A few weeks ago Sakura thought that would be enough for her. She could enjoy what they had for as long as it lasted without the burden of boundaries or expectations. But since that night on Yagami Street she’s come to realize that she was wrong; there are boundaries and expectations, but they all belong to Sasuke. Every aspect of their relationship has been determined by him. The when and where and who they tell. And as much as she wants to keep seeing him, Sakura isn’t sure of how much longer she can stand being at Sasuke’s beck and call. It’s against her nature, and what started out as pleasurable and loving has grown painful. 

Sakura makes herself watch the matches until Izumi’s turn comes, and then she no longer has to force interest. 

The announcer calls out, “Kagome Nishi versus Tsukino Izumi!”

Her genin walks onto the sands of the arena, steady and straight-backed. Her opponent is a Kiri ninja. He doesn’t sport the sharp teeth or gills that shinobi from his village sometimes have, but Nishi must be fourteen or fifteen, and he stands a good foot taller than Izumi. 

“That’s your girl, right, Sakura-chan?” Naruto asks. 

“Yeah. That’s my girl.” Saying it aloud gives her more confidence. Izumi might be small—smaller than Sakura even—but she’s a talented genin who deserves to be promoted. 

Nishi lunges at Izumi and barrages her with a series of strong kicks and punches, obviously hoping to overwhelm his opponent in close combat, but Izumi’s taijutsu is nearly as strong as her ninjutsu, and she easily blocks his blows and lands a few of her own. 

“She’s good,” Sasuke says. 

These are the first words he has spoken to her in days, and even though the compliment is directed at her student, Sakura still feels proud, because she’s the one who helped Izumi refine her techniques. 

Blades come out, and Izumi barely dodges a kunai. It glances across her upper arm, tearing her sleeve and leaving a line of blood across her skin. She ignores it, jumps backwards to make space between herself and Nishi, and lets a handful of shuriken fly. While he dodges the throwing stars, Izumi makes the hand seals for the Uchiha’s signature jutsu. Sakura recognizes them right away, but Nishi obviously doesn’t, because when a twenty-foot-high fireball comes toward him a moment later he shouts and covers his face and tries to jump out of the way.

He doesn’t jump far or fast enough. 

A few minutes later, the boy from the Mist Village is carried out of the arena on a stretcher, unconscious, his pale skin burned an ugly, oozing red. 

Izumi advances to the next round. 

“So she learned it,” Sasuke says. 

“She did.” Sakura can’t bring herself to look at him. Instead she stares at the disrupted arena sands. Golden waves that have been burnt and broken up.

“Sakura,” he says, and now his voice has changed. It’s lower, private. The rare tone he uses when he means to say something personal in a public space. “About the other night—”

“Don’t.” She doesn’t know whether he means to apologize or simply restate a hard truth in a gentler way. But if he makes her cry in front of Naruto and half their friends she’ll never forgive him. Or herself. 

“Fine. If that’s how you want it,” he says sharply. 

She faces him now, because she can’t believe Sasuke has the gall to be annoyed with her. “Don’t pretend that what I want matters to you in the least,” she whispers. 

She makes to walk out (Hachiro’s fight is still two matches away, enough time for her to breathe and gather herself), but Sakura doesn’t make it a foot before Sasuke catches her arm. “Wait,” he says, loud enough for every Konoha shinobi in the stands to hear. 

They all turn and look. Naruto frowns, Ino puts her hand over her mouth, and Kakashi-sensei raises his silver eyebrows. 

Sakura just smiles and asks, “Is there something you wanted, Sasuke-kun?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who comments, thank you for your feedback. It’s so encouraging, and it really inspires me to keep working on this story. Same goes for kudos. 
> 
> I hate that it took so long to update this time around, but I was sick for about three weeks and it really put me behind. I’ve also started a new job, and that’s consuming a lot of my time. Even if it takes a little longer to update than usual, rest assured that I am not giving up on this fic. I’m determined to see it through to the end. 
> 
> As always, a big, big thank you to my betas, uchihasass and tall-girl-in-a-small-world. You ladies are spectacular! 
> 
> Also, If you haven’t checked out uchihasass’s fic, A Light That Never Goes Out, you absolutely should. It’s incredibly well-written, engaging, and clever, and there are hints of SasuSaku that I hope to see evolve as the story goes on. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the beta for it.


	11. Chapter 11

Sasuke can feel them looking. Every Leaf ninja present for the exams, their curious eyes trained on him and Sakura. He’s still holding her arm, and she stands in front of him, smiling like he didn’t just grab her in public. Underneath that placid expression he can tell she’s angry. Maybe because of his outburst, but more likely she’s still upset about what he told her the last time they met privately. 

_Is there something you wanted Sasuke-kun?_

There’s plenty he wants from Sakura, but little of it that he plans to announce, least of all in front of half their Konoha peers. So he lets her go and says, “No, nothing.” 

Her smile grows weak and sad. She cradles her arm, as if the place where he touched her is tender, and leaves the stands. 

Naruto leans over Sakura’s empty seat and asks, “What was that about?” 

“It’s none of your business,” Sasuke says. 

Naruto frowns more deeply, his blue eyes narrow and suspicious. “The two of you have been weird lately.”

“Hn. If you say so.” 

He hopes that will dismiss the issue, but this is Naruto, so of course the dobe has more to say. “Well you’ve barely talked to each other since we got to Kiri. And Sakura-chan’s been crying. I saw her with her face all puffy.”

“What makes you think that has anything to do with me?”

Naruto snorts and says, “Because it’s always your fault when Sakura-chan cries.”

That stings, but Sasuke doesn’t allow himself to show it. Besides, it isn’t anything he doesn’t already know. He’s no good for Sakura, not really. 

Down in the arena, a new pair of genin are readying for their fight. Neither of them is a Konoha ninja, so Sasuke doesn’t particularly care about the outcome, but Naruto should be watching every match. “Pay attention to the exams, _Hokage_.” 

Naruto grumbles something about mouthy subordinates, but he drops his questioning and accusations. 

Sakura comes back just in time to see her other student’s fight. It goes quickly. Between the Hyuuga boy’s gentle fist technique and the wind jutsu Sakura undoubtedly taught him, he defeats his Suna opponent within minutes. 

“Your genin are doing well,” Sasuke says.

She nods. Won’t look at him, won’t speak to him. This isn’t the place for it anyway, but he wants to get some kind of reaction. Sakura has never before been indifferent to him, and he thinks it might be the one thing he can’t stand from her.

 

Neither of her students makes it to the last round. Hachiro loses his second fight, while Izumi is defeated in the semi-finals. It’s another day before the results of the third test are announced. When Sakura sees that Izumi wasn’t promoted to chunin she considers petitioning the examiners, but Kakashi tells her not to bother.

“The results are never overturned,” he says. “Don’t feel bad, though. None of the girls were passed this year, so there was probably someone on the examination board who just doesn’t like kunoichi.” 

“That really doesn’t make me feel any better, sensei. Just angrier.” 

Sasuke makes no attempt to join her in her cabin on the voyage back to Konoha—which is just as well, since Ino decides to actually use her bed on the return trip. At first Sakura thinks it’s because her friend and Shikamaru are having some kind of spat, but Ino’s actual reason for staying in their room becomes clear quickly enough.

“So,” she says. “What exactly is going on between you and Sasuke?”

Sakura sits up in bed and says, “Nothing. Really.” 

Ino rolls her eyes. “Oh come on. He caused that scene during the exams and you’ve been acting off for weeks. Something’s up.”

“What is it that you think is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Ino says. “That’s why I’m asking. Are you guys having a fight?”

“Sort of,” Sakura says. 

“Well, what’s it about?”

“Nothing, really. Sasuke’s just being Sasuke.” That’s true enough, at least. 

Ino lets it go, finally, and a few minutes later they say goodnight to each other. Sakura hugs her pillow and turns from side to side, but she can’t sleep. She lies awake for hours, eyes closed against the dark, willing her mind to calm. All she can think about is Sasuke, and the feeling is so reminiscent of her lovesick genin days that she’s angry with herself. She’s not a little girl anymore, and if Sakura has learned anything over the last few months it’s that Sasuke isn’t nearly as unreachable as he likes to pretend. So she gets up, slips out of her cabin, and walks down the hall to the room she saw him retire to earlier in the night (the only single besides Naruto’s). 

She knocks softly and waits. Except when he’s in the grip of a nightmare, Sasuke is a light sleeper, as most shinobi are, and she knows he’ll hear. Sure enough, he answers a moment later. Stands in the doorframe, shirtless and scowling. So beautiful that Sakura’s certainty wavers and she wonders if she has the strength to do what needs to be done. 

He doesn’t say anything, just steps aside and lets her into his cabin. Sakura stands a few feet away from him and hopes he doesn’t try to touch her. If he touches her, her resolve will crumble. 

“I need to talk to you,” Sakura says.

Sasuke leans against the wall. “Then talk.” 

She takes a deep breath, opens her mouth, then closes it. Confessing her love was easier and facing Kaguya was less terrifying than this. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I can’t keep seeing you. It—it hurts too much.” _You hurt me too much_.

Sasuke’s face is carefully blank, devoid of expression. He nods. 

“Don’t you have anything to say?” Sakura asks. 

“It wouldn’t make a difference if I did.”

That isn’t true, though. There are a dozen things he could tell her that would make her stay. “Right. I’ll just go then. Sorry if I woke you.”

She starts to leave, but Sakura doesn’t make it halfway to the door before Sasuke turns her around, his hands gripping her shoulders almost too strongly. For a moment there’s just silence and stillness between them, and she wonders what exactly it is that he means to do. 

Then Sasuke kisses her, and his mouth is nearly desperate on hers, possessive. He pushes her to the bed, down onto her back, and presses his body against her body, until they’re aligned from lips to tangled legs. He pulls up her nightdress, and Sakura shouldn't let him, but she does. She wants this, wants him, will want him for the rest of her life, and if she can't have forever then she'll settle for tonight. 

“This doesn’t change anything,” she tells him, if weakly, because he deserves to know she means what she said. 

Sasuke kisses her neck, her shoulder. Cups her breast hard enough to hurt just a bit, and maybe his roughness is a small reprisal, but when he puts a hand between her legs he’s as gentle as ever. Sakura can tell the difference in when he touches her to make her come and when he does it just to get her wet—she’s learned his body and she understands this part of him, if little else—and so she isn’t surprised when he stops just as the feelings mount and become overwhelming. 

“Please,” Sakura says, because all of her aches for him, and she doesn’t care how he has her as long as he does. 

He turns her onto her stomach and a moment later she feels his cock pressing against her, then stretching her, filling her, and she’s missed this. It’s been weeks since they made love, and it’s almost too much to stand. She’s glad she isn’t facing him, that he can’t see the hot tears sliding down her cheeks. By the time he makes her come once, twice—he goes slow, takes his time, drawing it out—she’s sobbing half from pleasure and half from grief. She’ll never have him again (and really she never had him at all).

When it’s over, Sasuke pulls away, falls to the place beside her, breathing hard. He leans his head back and she sees the long line of his throat, pale and perfect as the rest of him. Then he looks at her, reaches over and touches her damp cheek, wipes away the wetness there. He frowns and says, “At the exams, Naruto told me I always make you cry. I guess he was right.”

Sakura turns onto her side, away from him. “Naruto has made me cry plenty too, so he didn’t have any business saying that to you.”

Sasuke slides an arm around her waist and pulls her closer, so that they’re pressed together, nothing separating them but her wrinkled nightdress. He kisses the top of her head and says, “I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

She bites back fresh tears. Sasuke’s apologies are few and far between, and she hardly expected to hear one tonight. Sakura knows she needs to go now, because if she stays any longer she might relent and take back every word she spoke earlier. So she sits up and his hand falls first to her hip, then away, and at the loss of contact she feels empty and alone, even though he’s still here next to her. 

She stands, straightens her nightdress, looks over her shoulder at him—naked, tousled, impossibly handsome. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He doesn’t say anything; he never says anything when it truly matters. 

She leaves, takes the stairs up to the deck, to fresh air and midnight sky. When she walks to the bow she finds someone there already: Naruto, elbows at rest on the railing, looking out over the ocean. He turns to face her and Sakura sees that he’s been crying too. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

He scrubs at his tear-stained face and says, “I just really miss Hinata and the baby. It’s been weeks, yanno? Kushina’s probably not even gonna remember me.” 

Sakura puts her hand on Naruto’s shoulder (and she has to reach up because he’s so much taller than her now). “Little girls don’t forget their fathers as easily as that, Naruto.” 

He nods and wipes his cheeks with the sleeve of his pajamas. The gesture is so boyish and so much her friend that she has to smile. 

“What about you?” Naruto asks. “Why are you out here?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says. That isn’t a lie, at least, if not quite the full truth. 

“Well, let’s keep each other company, yeah?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Sakura says. 

They talk about how Kiri was too wet and the chunin exams were unfair. “Your girl should have passed,” Naruto agrees. 

Sakura leans over the railing and watches the ship knife through the rippling sea. “Well, I’m sure it will make Izumi feel better when I tell her that the Hokage himself thinks she should have been promoted.”

They keep talking into the early hours of the morning, and simply being in Naruto’s presence makes her feel a bit better. Like giving up the man she loves was strong instead of stupid, and maybe she can keep going after all. 

Just as the sun starts to rise, Sakura says goodnight to Naruto and returns to her room. Pads across the floor with light, graceful steps, careful not to wake Ino. She gets beneath the covers of her bed and finds that her mind is just as full with thoughts of Sasuke as it was when she left. 

 

He sits atop the Hokage monument in a nook between the effigies of the First and the Second. It’s a sunny day in Konoha, the sky bright and blue, and from here Sasuke has a plain view of the entire village. Green leaves and colorful roofs, shinobi and civilians milling through the streets. He stays there, ignoring a message to report to Naruto’s office, from afternoon to sunset, and then later. Until the shadows stretch across the ground and bleed into the darkness of night. 

Yesterday he returned to an empty apartment, dusty with neglect. So he swept the floors and washed the sheets and polished the furniture. He made himself a simple meal of soup and rice and ate in the relentless silence of his solitary home. Then he laid on his back in a bed that smelled of laundry detergent and regretted washing away whatever hint of Sakura may have been clinging to the linens. 

Tonight he sits on top of his small world and watches the moon brighten against a bruised purple sky. 

He didn’t think it would come to this. He didn’t think Sakura would leave him. But he pushed her too far and now she’s gone and he’s alone again. 

Sasuke makes his way back down to the nearly deserted village and wanders the streets. Tsukino’s is still open, and although a part of him craves a drink and the company of people, he decides against going inside. 

He follows the familiar, rebuilt roads of the too-new Konoha. Sasuke passes the hospital where Sakura could be working a night shift. The bench where she confessed her love for the second time in their lives. The restaurant where they once had breakfast together (not a date, he’d impressed upon her at the time) after a night spent making love. By the time he circles around to Sakura’s street, Sasuke realizes he’s been haunting the steps of a relationship that’s over. 

Her window is shuttered and dark; she isn’t home. 

Sasuke scales the nearest building and jumps from rooftop to rooftop until he reaches his own apartment. Inside, it’s as resoundingly quiet and utterly empty as the night before. He slices a tomato in half and eats both pieces. Cleans his weapons. Tries reading a novel, but he has never had much patience for this pastime. Like so much else, he sacrificed his literary skills to prepare himself as a shinobi. He puts the book away and doesn’t bother marking his place. 

He shouldn’t have skipped his meeting with Naruto. He should have demanded a new mission. Something useful to fill the hours. Tomorrow he’ll report to the Hokage’s office and request a new assignment. Preferably something S-rank, difficult, and dangerous. If he succeeds, his work will benefit the Leaf, and if he doesn’t—well, there are worse things than giving his life for Konoha, like Itachi. 

Later, after he falls asleep, Sasuke sees his brother. These nightmares are always drawn in shades of red and black, Tsukuyomi colors. (And what is a dream, really, if not a genjutsu of sorts?) He runs from the bodies of his dead mother and dead father. He runs after the disappearing fragments of his resurrected Nisan. And then he sees _her_ , lying in a crimson pool, so still she barely looks real. When he wakes, terrified and alone, shouting into the shadows of his barren bedroom, it’s Sakura’s name on his lips and Sakura he reaches for, before he remembers that she isn’t there. That she won’t be there ever again. 

 

Sasuke stands before the Hokage’s desk, tired and angry. “I want a long mission. S-rank if you have one, A-rank if you don’t.” 

“You’ll get what I give you,” Naruto says. He rifles through the papers on his perpetually cluttered desk. “Here. You might remember this target, Hamasaki Haru, from your mission with Fujimoto.”

It would be hard to forget Hamasaki. The young man is a murderer who runs a prostitution ring out of the city of Tosogawa. He was an apprentice of Fujimoto’s, so he has the skills of a ninja, but without a hidden village’s formal training. 

“I’m surprised you haven’t taken care of Hamasaki already.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Naruto says. “After you killed Fujimoto he left Tosogawa and laid low. But now our intel says he’s back and running things.”

Sasuke looks over the mission directive. He’s to infiltrate the Golden Lotus brothel by selling a kunoichi in disguise to Hamasaki. 

“The assassination will be the kunoichi’s, but you’re going to have to provide support and make sure she gets out of there in one piece,” Naruto says. “We have it on good authority that Hamasaki likes to—well, to try out new girls before he sells them—so she should have an opportunity to get him alone and make the kill.”

“I’ll take it.” Most of the harlots in Hamasaki’s brothels were there against their will, and Sasuke would like nothing more than to see him pay for his crimes. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as I find a kunoichi willing to take this mission. Just between you and me, so far Hanabi is the only one who volunteered, but I turned her down. Hinata would have killed me if I sent her baby sister on this one.” Naruto rubs his face and says, “Anyway, come back tomorrow morning. Hopefully I’ll have found somebody by then and you can leave together.”

He returns to the Hokage’s office at eight o’clock the next day, and Naruto’s assistant tells him to take a seat in the hall. “Hokage-sama is debriefing another shinobi,” she says. “Please wait here.”

Sasuke sits in an unforgiving metal chair and waits to see who his mission partner will be. It’s a full fifteen minutes before the door to Naruto’s office opens. The Hokage steps out, smiling brightly. “Good news, Sasuke. Sakura-chan’s coming with you. Between the two of you guys, Hamasaki and his people don’t stand a chance!” 

Sakura gives him an apologetic smile. “Guess we’re working together this time, Sasuke-kun,” she says. 

He turns to Naruto, and for the first time in a long time he’s truly angry with his friend. “What the hell are you thinking, sending her on this mission?”

Naruto frowns, but before he can open his mouth, Sakura says, “Hamasaki Haru isn’t even a real shinobi, and I’m twice the fighter he is anyway.” 

“What’s that you said to me before my mission with Fujimoto? About not underestimating my opponents?” Sasuke asks.

Sakura blushes, but she stands firm. “I can handle myself.” 

Sasuke ignores her and speaks to Naruto instead. “She’s a medic-nin. The best in Konoha, maybe the best in any hidden village. Why risk her on this?” He steps closer and says, more fiercely, “Do you really want Sakura alone with a man like Hamasaki?”

“I’m more than a medic-nin,” Sakura says. She sounds as furious as Sasuke feels. “Besides, I’ll kill Hamasaki before he has a chance to touch me.” 

“I’m trying to protect you!” He thinks of the dream he had: Sakura, bleeding and lifeless, lost to him. 

“Well I’m not yours to protect!” she shouts. “And I’m going on this damn mission whether you like it or not. Isn’t that right, Naruto?”

“If you give her this assignment you really are an idiot,” Sasuke says. 

Naruto smiles, but it isn’t his usual happy expression. There is something harsh and fox-like in the lines of his grin. “Sakura is the best kunoichi for this job,” he says. “And she’s gonna take out Hamasaki, with or without you there to help. Do I need to find another shinobi to support her?”

 _Dobe_ , Sasuke thinks, but all he says is, “No, Naruto. You don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Thank you to everyone who leaves kudos and reviews. I clearly have a great bunch of readers, and I appreciate all the encouraging, thoughtful comments. So thank you so much to everyone who’s been giving me feedback. And thank you to my incredible and clever betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass, for keeping this fic so well-edited.


	12. Chapter 12

They run for hours, not saying a word to one another. Sakura is too furious to speak. Usually her anger is verbal and visceral, quick to come and quick to go, but not this time. Sasuke tried to get her thrown off this mission. He questioned her abilities in front of the Hokage, as if she were still some useless girl always in need of rescuing. 

Sakura knows she isn’t that child anymore, the burden of her squad. And she thought Sasuke knew that as well, that he appreciated her skills as a shinobi. Perhaps she has spent too many hours babysitting her genin and healing civilians’ broken arms for him to remember the woman she was in the war, the fighter who saved his life. Or maybe the problem is that Sasuke is a man made almost entirely by his past, and when he looks at her he still sees that same foolish little girl who mooned over him. Who cared more about her long hair than becoming a strong kunoichi. 

Now she runs in his wake—a few feet behind Sasuke because he’s still faster than her, and it only makes her angrier that no matter how hard she trains, she’ll never catch up. 

The land beyond Konoha is wild with green life. Untamed forest between the Fire Country and its neighboring nations, interrupted only by a handful of farming towns and unnamed villages. They skirt around these places, keep going west and west and west until they hit the border. The sun sets, turning the darkening sky into a brilliant canvas of colors. Gold, orange, and the kind of deep red every shinobi knows well. 

“We should find a place to make camp,” Sasuke says. It’s the first words he has spoken to her since they left Naruto’s office. 

She isn’t tired. Sweaty, dirty, bug-bitten, but not tired. 

Sakura shakes her head. “Let’s keep moving. We can get there before midnight if we—”

“No.” Sasuke says that one syllable so definitively. He’s used to getting his way, used to doing what he wants without regard for others. Selfish, really, and she isn’t in the mood to forgive his flaws tonight. 

“I’m going,” she says. “You can stay here or you can come with me.” And then she turns away from him, turns west, and starts running again. 

“Sakura!” She hears him come after her, feels his fingers close around her arm, forcing her to stop. He holds her firmly, but not hard enough to hurt, and when he grasps her shoulder with his other hand there’s a strange gentleness to his touch. A delicacy at odds with his stony expression and the harshness of his voice. “You’re not going anywhere without me,” he says. 

There’s a change in his tone that stops Sakura from pulling away. She knows, somehow, that this isn’t an order; it’s a promise. 

There’s been an emptiness inside of her since their last night together, but for a moment, caught in his grasp, the ache of loss is dispelled. Without meaning to she leans into him, and before she can get a hold of herself Sasuke brings her closer, wraps his arms around her body. Sakura breathes in the familiar smell of him, the heady scent that she finds comforting, that wakes desire in her belly even here, even now. 

She pushes against his chest, a silent request for him to let her go. At first his grip only tightens, and Sakura thinks he may keep holding on, but then he releases her, steps back. 

“Are you scared?” he asks. 

“This isn’t my first mission like this, Sasuke.”

He scowls. “Naruto sends you on this sort of assignment often?”

“No, Naruto never has before, but Tsunade-shishou gave me a few. I know she didn’t like to, but she refused to treat me any differently than other kunoichi just because I was her apprentice.” 

Sakura remembers the first time. She’d been seventeen, the war only a few months over, and she was so nervous she nearly lost control of her transformation jutsu in front of her target. 

“Let’s go,” she says, and they run together. Silent again, but the quiet between them is companionable now instead of resentful. 

 

Tosogawa sits just twenty miles north of Amegakure, and by the time they reach the outskirts of the city Sasuke is soaked. Rain falls from a black sky, the steady downpour punctuated by a flash of lightning and roll of thunder. The surrounding woods are lush, dense, and there’s plenty of cover from which to survey Tosogawa, to scout out the best entrance. 

Sakura stops by an old maple tree, takes off her pack, and says, “I should change.” 

Sasuke gives his back to her. He tries not to listen to the sound of Sakura taking off her shirt, shorts, and shoes, but he hears it all the same, and the only thing he can think about is that she’s naked not five feet from him. A minute later she tells him he can turn around, and when he does he finds that she changed more than her clothes. Long hair falls down her back, now brown instead of pink. Her lips are fuller, nose more delicate, cheekbones higher. She has also, he notices, made her forehead a shade smaller. Only her eyes are the same. 

He suspects that, in addition to hiding her identity, her intention was to make herself more attractive, but in this she has failed. There’s no fault in her jutsu; the problem is simply that Sakura is a strikingly beautiful woman, and any tampering with her looks can only render her less lovely than before.

“That’s a good transformation,” he says.

“Thanks.” 

Sasuke performs the seals for his own henge—dog, boar, ram—and focuses on taking the appearance of a fruit vendor he’s seen on the streets of Konoha. 

Sakura smiles softly, and even on her too-generous mouth the expression is still recognizably _her_. “I know Mr. Yaguchi,” she says. “I buy you tomatoes from him. He’s a nice man.” 

She wears a blue, cotton yukata, and there’s a pair of geta on her feet. She could have transformed her clothes as well as her face, of course, but she’s performing the bare minimum henge, no doubt so that she can reserve chakra and more easily maintain the jutsu. 

“Ready?” she asks. 

Sasuke nods, and they walk toward the city. Sakura’s wooden sandals sink into the soft ground with every step, and she curses when one shoe gets stuck. She pulls her foot out of the mud, shakes the muck off, and keeps going. 

Tosogawa is ugly and industrial, all protruding pipes, rusted signs, and steel buildings strung together by cables. A smaller, civilian version of Ame, just as rainy and just as bleak. According to the mission directive, the Golden Lotus is on Kinu Road at the very center of the city, so Sasuke and Sakura follow a wide lane that leads north. Despite the weather and the late hour, the streets are alive with people. There are whorehouses, pawn shops, and gambling dens. Metal bars cage the doors and windows of apartments. Women with painted faces stand on every other corner, smiling false smiles and beckoning to the men who pass by. 

Sakura grasps his hand and says, “I hate this.”

Sasuke doesn’t much like it either, and the longer it takes to find the Golden Lotus the more he’s tempted to take Sakura and return to Konoha, assignment be damned. He has never abandoned a mission before, but he doesn’t want Sakura in this seedy city another minute. 

They turn onto Kinu Road, and Sakura says, “There.” She points to a sign with a flower painted on it, yellow against black. “That’s it.”

Sasuke lets go of her hand, then grips her arm. “Are you ready?” he asks.

She nods, and he leads her into the brothel. 

 

Sakura’s hair and clothes are drenched, and her feet are covered in mud. She’s glad now that she put as much work into her face as she could, because the rest of her is a mess. 

At least it’s warm and dry inside the Golden Lotus, a welcome respite after the cold, driving rain outside. 

A short man dressed all in black approaches. “What’s this?” he asks.

“I have a new peach for your boss,” Sasuke says. 

The man in black looks her up and down. He has narrow, greedy eyes that linger on her breasts, where the wet fabric of her yukata clings. “Get Hamasaki. He’ll want to see this one,” he says to a young woman—no, a _girl_. Under her heavy makeup and scarlet kimono is a child of no more than fifteen. 

Sakura does not like killing—it doesn’t give her a rush or a high that she’s heard some shinobi describe—but she thinks she may enjoy assassinating Hamasaki Haru. 

The girl returns in five minutes with a tall, broad-shouldered man, as big as Jiraiya once stood. He isn’t what Sakura was anticipating; she expected Hamasaki to be as ugly as his ventures, but instead he’s young and handsome, with short black hair and long-lashed dark eyes. Under other circumstances she would have found him attractive, but knowing what he does to women, it’s difficult to hide her disgust. 

Hamasaki looks her over, half appraising and half lustful. Sakura lowers her head, trying to appear demure, but he grabs her chin and tilts her face up for better inspection. “Lovely,” he says. “I’ve never seen eyes this color before.” 

Then he slips a hand inside her yukata and cups her breast. Without thinking, Sakura shoves him away. Hamasaki stumbles, straightens himself, and backhands her. 

She reels, head spinning from the slap, and she has to focus to maintain her disguise. The transformation jutsu almost slips, but Sakura has near-perfect chakra control, and she manages to keep her false features in place. 

Beside her, Sasuke stands completely still and silent, but she can feel his anger as surely as if he had shown it. 

“So you’re a fighter,” Hamasaki says. “I don’t like that. I prefer my women soft and willing.”

 _Then perhaps you shouldn’t rape them_. 

Hamasaki turns to Sasuke and asks, “Why give up a beauty like this?” 

“I’ve had my fill of her,” Sasuke says evenly. “And I need the money more than I need a whore.” 

Hamasaki nods. He asks her, “What’s your name, sweetheart?” 

“Yu,” Sakura says. 

“Too plain. We’ll call you Mayuko.” Hamasaki snaps his fingers, and the young girl in the red kimono walks over. “Take this one to the bath, she smells like she’s been on the road. Don’t paint her, though. I want her face bare.”

The girl gives a shallow bow and says to Sakura, “Follow me.”

Two women too old and plain to be prostitutes attend Sakura in the bath. They wash her hair, pour scented oils into the hot water, and scrub her back. It feels good after a long day of travel, and if she weren’t so angry she might have enjoyed it. Peach, beauty, sweetheart, whore. She’s tired of being referred to like an object instead of a person, and her cheek still stings from the blow Hamasaki dealt her. 

They dress her in a green silk garment too small to be worn outside of a bedroom and serve her an innocent-looking cup of tea that Sakura hopes she won’t have to drink. 

“I’m not thirsty,” she says. 

One of the old women looks like a grandmother, and she gives Sakura a gentle smile. “Don’t worry, dear, it’s just jasmine,” she says. 

Sakura dislikes flower flavors, but she recognizes the scent because both her mother and Ino favor it. The tea _does_ smell like jasmine and nothing more. 

In Konoha she took an antidote that would counteract most poisons, same as she does before any dangerous mission. The women are looking at her strangely, and she doesn’t want to raise suspicion, so Sakura takes one sip of the tea and hopes that if it’s drugged her antidote will protect her. 

The girl in red returns. She says, “Come with me, Mayuko,” and leads Sakura up two flights of stairs. The top floor of the brothel has larger, grander rooms, and she delivers Sakura to the biggest and best-appointed of them all. She barely takes in the hardwood furniture and gilded mirrors. All she sees is the grand, four-poster bed, wide enough to sleep half a dozen people comfortably. 

Once she’s alone, Sakura performs a silencing jutsu, sealing the sound in the room so that no one can hear what’s happening inside. This way, if her fight with Hamasaki goes south, his men won’t come running upstairs to help him. 

Then she sits and waits for her target—for so long that she grows tired, heavy-limbed and sluggish, and the feather bed beneath her tempts her to lie down. Maybe Sasuke was right and they should have made camp for the night. If she had listened to him, she could be sleeping right now. _Just for a minute_ , she thinks, and Sakura lets herself slump down onto the soft counterpane. 

She lies there, half-awake and half-asleep, so weary that she barely registers the sound of the door opening. She forces herself to sit up, but the room spins. 

_The tea_. There must have been a sedative in it, something to take the fight out of her. She never should have drank it. She should have thrown it in the old woman’s face. It takes what energy she has to preserve her transformation jutsu, to uphold her counterfeit appearance. 

Hamasaki is here now and she doesn't have time to pull the sedative out of her body, the way she once pulled Sasori's poison out of Kankuro. 

“You seem calmer now,” he says. “Good.” 

He sits beside her on the bed and runs his fingers through her hair. The last time a man touched her this way it was Sasuke, but Sakura pushes that thought away. Hamasaki kisses her, and she tastes mint on his tongue, but she only feels this dully, as if she is far away. As if this is happening to some other woman. 

But Sakura is a shinobi of Konoha before anything else, and as Hamasaki pushes her down and presses her to the bed, the only thing she’s paying attention to is the tanto he has sheathed on his hip. She has to play along, distract him, and as much as she hates it, Sakura kisses him back, runs her hands across his chest and then under his shirt. When she grasps his thigh, Hamasaki breathes in sharply and closes his eyes. 

_Now_.

Sakura snatches the tanto out of its holster and stabs him in the back. She aims for his left kidney, but she’s still slowed from the drug and she knows she missed. Hamasaki shouts and rears away from her. Sakura lets her henge go—there’s no need for a disguise now, her target will be dead in a minute—and focuses her chakra throughout her body, rejuvenating herself. Her strength won’t be monstrous, not when she’s fighting off the effects of a sedative, but she’ll still be stronger than Hamasaki. 

His eyes widen when he takes in her new appearance, and she can tell he recognizes her. Hamasaki scrambles off the bed and begins making hand seals for a jutsu Sakura doesn’t know. She jumps away from him, but it doesn’t matter, because a moment later the room fills with water. She’s submerged before she can do anything, surrounded by a cold that shocks her. Sakura keeps her mouth closed, but there’s something unnatural about this water that steals her breath. She gasps, chokes, as her lungs are flooded.

And then Hamasaki is there. For the second time in her life, Sakura feels the sharp pain of a blade sliding through the soft skin of her stomach. 

 

Something is wrong. Sasuke hears no screams, nor the sound of jutsu wrecking the upper floor of the brothel, but he knows somehow that the mission has gone awry. 

Hamasaki told him to wait in the common room, that he would pay him generously if the new peach pleased him well. Sasuke is sick of waiting, so he heads up the stairs, bypassing Hamasaki’s men as if they aren’t there. 

On the second floor one man grabs him by the arm and says, “Boss told you to stay put.”

Sasuke punches him in the face, almost hard enough to kill him, but not quite, and he falls to the floor, unconscious. He takes the katana strapped to the man’s side and continues up the stairs. The sword is nowhere near as fine as his own, but it will do.

The third floor is too quiet. So silent that he can hear his own footsteps, the light tread of a ninja on hardwood. 

Sasuke opens the middle door and freezing water pours out, spilling along the hallway and flowing down the stairs like a waterfall. He rushes into the bedroom, katana drawn—and then he sees her: Sakura, with her hands wrapped around Hamasaki’s neck. She wrenches, once, to the right, and his head turns around on his shoulders. Sasuke can hear the sickening crack of bone breaking, and then the light of awareness goes out of Hamasaki’s eyes. Sakura lets go, and the dead man falls to the floor limply, like a marionette with its strings cut.

He’s seen Sakura the kunoichi, the healer, the teacher, the lover. But he’s never seen Sakura the killer before, and Sasuke doesn’t know quite how to place it. 

For a moment she stands over the body, steady and cool, collected as any well-trained shinobi after a kill. But the moment ends and she stumbles. Sasuke rushes forward, catches her before she can hit the floor, and now he notices the blood. She has a wound, a deep one, and Sasuke doesn’t have to be a medic-nin to know that she would never make it back to Konoha in this condition. 

“Can you fix it?” he asks. 

She nods, pulls up her silk nightdress, and puts her shaking hands over the gash. He watches as her skin slowly knits back together, and he tells himself that this is not like his dream. Sakura is alive and she’s going to stay that way. 

He hears footsteps on the stairs. Four men, maybe five. 

“Stay here,” Sasuke says. “Keep healing yourself. I’ll take care of it.”

He catches them at the top of the landing. They outnumber him, but these are thugs with knives, not shinobi of a hidden village. It’s unfair, really, but fairness is not something a ninja concerns himself with. Sasuke moves through a kata he knows well, and the men fall, one by one. Nobody even manages to disrupt his transformation jutsu. He avoids giving mortal wounds where he can, but one stupid soul keeps coming back for more, and Sasuke has no choice but to cut off the hand that wields a kunai. The man hits the floor screaming, blood gushing from the stump of his right wrist. 

Sasuke cleans his katana, sheaths it, and returns to Sakura. 

She has transformed herself again—long hair, full mouth, softer body—and Sasuke is thankful that she has the energy for a henge. If she can maintain a jutsu like that, she can run. 

“We need to go,” he says.

“Right.” Her voice is hoarse, she’s drenched in blood and water, shivering, and she’s white as a sheet, but there’s a determination in Sakura’s eyes that he knows well.

They pass the mangled men on the floor, most of them too weak to stir. Sakura stares at the man with a stump instead of a hand, but she doesn’t comment on it. Just like he doesn’t say anything about the dead man in the room behind them. 

Patrons dandle prostitutes on their laps in the common room. They gape at Sasuke and Sakura, both bloodied all over, but no one moves to stop them. The girl in the red kimono keeps her head down, back pressed against the wall as if she hopes to disappear into the wallpaper. As they pass by her, Sasuke says, “If I were you, I’d get out of here. Now.” 

That isn’t quite true, though. If Sasuke were her, he’d have killed Hamasaki long ago. 

Outside, Tosogawa is just as ugly as it was at midnight, the driving rain still cold.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sakura says.

Sasuke follows her down Kinu Road, then onto Suzaku Street. South and east, toward Konoha. Toward home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everybody, I don’t know about you but I’m still throwing a party over chapters 699 and 700. My OTP is canon and I could not be more ecstatic! Plus, little salad-chan is a cutie. Girl clearly has her mama’s smarts and her daddy’s attitude. ;)
> 
> Thank you so much to the people who continue to comment and leave kudos on this story! It’s so exciting to see what readers have to say, so every bit of feedback is incredibly welcome. Hopefully this installment lived up to the hype, since I know a lot of people were looking forward to my take on a mission like this. 
> 
> Once again, I must thank my fantastic betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass, for editing this chapter and helping me clean it up. You lovely ladies are the best. 
> 
> Just a heads up: _In Times of Peace_ is coming to a close soon. Chapter Fifteen should be the last. I’m a little sad to see this story ending, but hopefully you all are enjoying reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.


	13. Chapter 13

Sakura and Sasuke make camp in a cave ten miles west of the Fire Country’s border. They’re far from Ame, but the rain persists, and the sky is grey and bleak despite the dawn.

Sakura is so exhausted she can barely stand. Wearied from travel, blood loss, and the remains of the drugged tea she drank at the Golden Lotus. She mended her wound and removed as much of the sedative as she could while Sasuke fought off Hamasaki’s men at the brothel, but there wasn’t time to heal herself properly. Now she’s ready to collapse, but while Sasuke builds a small fire, Sakura performs a quick blood replenishing jutsu on herself. She feels nothing at first, but as the minutes pass, warmth overtakes the creeping cold under her skin and her strength starts to return.

“Here,” Sasuke says, and he gives her his jacket.

“Thank you.” She’s still wearing nothing but the silk shift they gave her at the Golden Lotus, now stained and ripped. Sakura wraps the jacket around her body, using it like a blanket, and scoots closer to the young fire.

Sasuke surprises her by sitting by her side and sliding his arm around her waist. “You’re freezing,” he says.

Maybe she ought to protest. It’s only been a few days since she ended things between them, and he really shouldn’t touch her so freely, as if she belongs to him. But all Sakura does is rest her head on his shoulder and breathe in the scents of rain, blood, and woodsmoke.

“I’m glad you were the one with me on this mission,” she says. “I know I can trust you, and I needed that.”

“I still wish Naruto had chosen another kunoichi for this one,” Sasuke says. “Not because you can’t handle it; I know you can. But you don’t belong in a place like Tosogawa. You’re too—” He stops himself and looks away from her.

“Too what?” she asks.

Sasuke sighs. “Too good. Too pure.”

Sakura would almost want to laugh—she’s not very good and there’s little left of her that’s pure—but there’s something in the way Sasuke speaks those words, softly, almost reverent, that keeps her from finding this funny.

“Thank you,” she whispers.  

Sakura falls asleep and dreams of a different life. One in which she is a simple woman and Sasuke is a simple man. They raise rice and three children, and it’s just possible that they’re happy together.

She wakes with a smile on her lips. Now she’s on the rock floor, and their fire is dying down to ash and red-hot embers. Sasuke lies behind her, his hard body pressed flush against her back, so close and warm. Still half-asleep, the memory of the sweet dream lingering, she stretches against him and says, “Sasuke-kun.” She hears his breath quicken, feels his arm tighten around her middle.

Then he pulls away and says, “We should get back to Konoha.”

Suddenly Sakura feels cold again. Awake and aware, the lie of a simple life dispelled.

 

Sasuke sees little of Sakura in the weeks after their mission. When Naruto drags them out to Ichiraku she’s always careful to sit away from him, and whenever he tries to speak to her she is too busy to talk. So he stops trying.

He follows a strict routine, not so different from the way he lived before, but now it feels empty. When he trains, when he cooks, when he goes to bed, he misses Sakura. Sasuke expects this ache to fade with autumn, but it doesn’t.

Nights are the worst. Without Sakura beside him, he dreams of his dead family almost every time he sleeps. Itachi weaves in and out, sometimes an enemy, sometimes the Nisan he loves, but always elusive. Always out of reach.  

Winter comes, then spring. The Leaf withers, and the Leaf blooms, and Sasuke’s days feel hollow, no matter how full they are. He takes the longest, most dangerous missions that come across the Hokage’s desk, and when he’s forced to stay in Konoha he spends his time training and sparring with Naruto.

Sasuke tries to teach himself some medical ninjutsu so that he can avoid the hospital, but healing is much harder than he anticipated and he’s hopeless at it. So the next time he’s injured, Sasuke goes to Naruto’s house and asks Hinata to fix his broken arm.

She gives him her soft, nervous smile and invites him inside. Naruto isn’t home yet, so she puts Kushina in her playpen, directs him to sit on the living room couch, and examines him.

“This should only take a few minutes,” Hinata says. “The fractures aren’t too bad.”

While she works, Sasuke watches the baby. She’s about nine months old now, and she crawls around the playpen, picking up toys and chewing on them. Kushina tries to stand once, but she’s barely on her feet for a second before she falls backwards and lands on her diapered bottom. Sasuke feels a strange pang of envy, and before he can stop himself, he wonders what his children might look like if Sakura were their mother—

“You could have gone to the hospital,” Hinata says in her gentle way. “Sakura’s not even in Konoha today. She’s on a mission with her genin.”

Sasuke considers claiming that his choice to come here had nothing to do with Sakura, but for some reason he finds it difficult to be dishonest with Naruto’s wife. “Do you know when she gets back?” he asks.

Hinata nods. “Tomorrow, if her mission goes well.”

Sasuke can feel his bones mending. Not quite as painlessly or as quickly as when Sakura heals him, but expertly done nonetheless. Now that he’s tried his hand at medical ninjutsu, he has a greater appreciation for the work Sakura does, and perhaps he should tell her so the next time he sees her.

Maybe tomorrow he will speak to her. Confess that the shirt she can’t find is at his apartment, and when she dropped by in November to ask if he still had any of her things he flatly lied when he said, “No.” That he hasn’t had one peaceful night’s sleep since she left him, and he misses the smell of her hair almost as much as the sound of her laugh.

There are many things Sasuke could tell Sakura, but he knows that he won’t.

“Are you all right?” Hinata asks.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

It’s difficult to read the Hyuuga. They are a reserved clan, guarded, and their wide eyes appear blank and inexpressive outside of combat. Even so, Sasuke can tell she doesn’t believe him.

“There, all better,” Hinata says.

“Thank you.” Sasuke stretches his arm, says goodbye, and returns to the apartment that has felt less and less like home in Sakura’s absence.

 

She passes her days taking missions, training her genin, and healing at the hospital. Visiting her parents and Naruto, cooking with Ino, and babysitting little Kushina. Sakura stays so busy that she hopes she won’t have time to think about Sasuke, but this isn’t quite how things work out. She finds herself distracted during conversations, over dinner with her family, while she’s mending broken bones and burns.

She’s having breakfast with her mother early one Sunday morning when her thoughts drift to Sasuke once again. She saw him at lunch with the rest of Team 7 just yesterday, and she can’t help but think he looks tired. Beautiful and stubborn as ever, but weary, and she worries about him.

“Sakura? Did you even hear me?” Okaasan asks.

“What? No, I’m—I’m sorry.” Sakura runs a hand through her hair. “What did you say?”

Okaasan frowns at her. “I said you seem sad. I want to know what’s wrong.”

“It’s Sasuke,” Sakura says.

Her mother asks, “What about him?”

“Oh, same old, same old. I love him, and he doesn’t love me back.” She shrugs and smiles, takes a bite of tamagoyaki.

Sakura knows her relationship with Sasuke is over. She isn’t bound by any of the rules he set anymore, and she doesn’t owe him anything. If she wanted, she could tell her mother everything. She could, but she doesn’t.

Okaasan sighs and asks, “How long has it been now?”

“Twelve years,” Sakura says. “Isn’t that pathetic? To pine after the same man for all that time?”

“You aren’t pathetic. You’re clever and beautiful and the best kunoichi in this village. I like Sasuke—he’s a good man, I think, despite all he’s done—but if he can’t see those things, then he doesn’t deserve you,” Okaasan says firmly.

“I know,” Sakura says. “Trust me, I do.”

If she was willing to accept less than she deserved, Sakura would still be at Sasuke’s beck-and-call, running to him whenever he was in the mood for her and running away whenever he wasn’t.

“You’ll be all right,” her mother says. She reaches across the table and takes her hand. “You’re a strong woman.”

“Thanks,” Sakura says. “You always know how to make me feel better.”

Okaasan smiles. “It’s what mothers do, sweetheart. You’ll understand that one day.”

Sakura isn’t so sure that’s true, but she would like for it to be. Maybe, now that she’s had her chance with him, she can let Sasuke go and find some other man. Move on, get married, and have children. She isn’t naive enough to believe that she’ll ever love anyone else the way she has loved Sasuke, but Sakura thinks that perhaps she can try to make a new life anyway.

She turns twenty-four at the end of March, and Naruto throws her a surprise party that she pretends not to know about. Part of her hopes Sasuke will show up, but eight o’clock passes, then nine, then ten, and with every hour that he doesn’t walk through the door Sakura drinks more sake. By midnight she’s half drunk, and she sits at a corner table with all of the Rookie 9 besides Sasuke. There is an extra chair at the table, waiting for him, but she is certain he won’t be claiming it.

“Happy birthday!” Kiba shouts, and the others echo him.

Naruto glares at the empty chair like it has personally offended him. “I can’t believe Sasuke didn’t show,” he says.

“Yeah, because he’s so social.” Ino rolls her eyes. “Forget him. Let him stay home and polish his weapons, or whatever it is he does.”

Sakura wonders about Sasuke’s nights, and whether he’s found company to keep. Some new woman to warm his bed. It hurts too much to think about for long, so she goes to the bar and orders another bottle of sake.

Someone warm and strong wraps his arm around her from behind. She doesn’t think for a moment that it’s Sasuke, because he would never be so familiar with her in public.

“What do you want, Taro?”

He laughs. “Is that any way to greet a friend?”

“We’re not friends,” Sakura corrects him. “We barely know each other.”

“Then get to know me better.” He bends down and kisses the side of her neck, a fleeting press of lips that would have once made her heart beat faster. But now that she’s known Sasuke’s touch, Taro’s feels disappointing. A reminder of what she’s lost, what she’ll never have again.

She remembers what it felt like to lie in bed after she and Taro finished fucking: empty, thrown-away. Things couldn’t have been more different with Sasuke, who nearly always wanted to kiss and hold her even after the sex was over. It was almost like he couldn’t keep himself from touching her, and nothing else in Sakura’s life has made her feel as wanted. She remembers all the nights she spent with Sasuke, just cooking and talking and sleeping in the same bed. Nothing like her time with Taro, who only ever satisfied her between the sheets.

She knows he can’t offer her any of the things Sasuke could. Besides, she’s done letting herself be used. Sakura would rather be alone than with a man who won’t respect her.

She unwraps his arm from around her waist, takes the hot bottle of sake from the bartender, and says, “Goodnight, Taro. Don’t bother me again.”

Hours later, when the party is over and Sakura is feeling uncomfortably sober, she walks through the streets of Konoha, dreading the cold bed that waits for her at home. She circles around to Sasuke’s part of town, and some weak part of her wants to visit his apartment. Not to sleep together—she knows better than to go down that road again. Sakura just wants to talk to him, spar with him, see his rare smile. She’d do almost anything to break the frozen silence that’s fallen between them, but she’s scared of trying. Terrified that as soon as she lets Sasuke in he’ll find some fresh way to hurt her.

 

The morning after Sakura’s birthday party, Sasuke wakes to an angry Hokage knocking on his door.

“Sasuke! Open up, dammit!” Naruto shouts.

Sasuke lets him inside, if only to keep him from breaking down the door.

“You’re an ass, you know that?” Naruto says. He walks into Sasuke’s living room as if he owns the place—and in a way he does, because this whole village is his to protect.

“What do you want?”

“I wanted you to come to your teammate’s party, but it’s a little late for that.”

“Like Sakura cares.” And Sasuke can’t help but add, feeling bitter and resentful, “She wouldn’t have talked to me if I’d been there.”

“Why not?” Naruto asks. “What did you do to Sakura-chan?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.” Naruto points at him and says, “I’ve known you both for half our lives, and I can tell when you’re hiding something.”

“It’s none of your concern, Naruto.” Sasuke leans against the wall and puts his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants. He tries to look bored, disinterested, but he doubts he’s successful. For some reason he isn’t much in the mood to dissemble.

“You and Sakura are my friends,” Naruto says. “And you’re not talking to each other. You haven’t for months. Our team hasn’t been this broken since—well, since you left Konoha. Something happened, and you gotta tell me what it is so I can help you fix it.”

“This isn’t your problem,” Sasuke says, sharply, so maybe his friend will mind his own business.

But Naruto is as single-minded and stubborn as ever. He crosses his arms over his chest and says, “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”

He could try to kick Naruto out, or feed him a believable lie. Something with just enough honesty in it to sound realistic.

Instead, he finds himself telling the truth.

“I slept with Sakura,” Sasuke says.

Naruto freezes, and he asks, “What?”

“You heard me.” He’s not saying it again; he already regrets saying it once, but it’s too late to take his words back.

Naruto is quiet for a long moment, then he rushes at Sasuke and pushes him in the chest, hard. This close, Sasuke sees that the lines on Naruto’s cheeks stand out more harshly than usual, that there is a hint of red to his sky blue eyes.

“You bastard,” Naruto says. “You _know_ how Sakura-chan feels about you. How could you take advantage of that?”

Sasuke laughs, a short, rough sound with little humor behind it. This must be the wrong thing to do, because Naruto grabs him by the front of his shirt and shakes him. “What’s so funny, huh?”

“You,” Sasuke says. “Tell me, Naruto, what bothers you more: that I hurt Sakura, or that I was fucking her right under your nose and you were too blind to notice?”

Naruto hits him, and pain bursts behind his left eye. Sasuke shoves his friend away, readies himself for a fight, and maybe that’s what he’s been looking for since Naruto knocked on his door.

Their combat is all fury and little skill, more a brawl than taijutsu. They kick and punch each other, and in five minutes they’ve broken every piece of furniture in the living room. When they’re both bruised and bloodied and too tired to keep going, Naruto lets himself slide down the wall to the floor. The anger seems to have gone out of him, and he sits there, breathing hard and frowning.

Sasuke takes a seat next to him, stretches out his legs, and gingerly touches his sore ribs. One or two of them might be cracked, but the only way he’ll know for sure is if he goes to the hospital and risks seeing Sakura. He’d ask Hinata to heal him again, but it seems wrong to go to her for help right after breaking her husband’s nose.

“You’re a shit friend,” Naruto says. He sounds more weary than accusatory.

“Hn. I know.” Sasuke leans his head back and looks up at the ceiling. A water mark spreads across the white surface like an indelible brown cloud.

“Why would you do that?” Naruto asks.

Sasuke doesn’t answer for a long while. When he finally speaks his words are slow and measured. “Because I wanted her, and I’m used to taking what I want.”

Naruto sighs. “That’s not very fair.”

Little was fair about the way he treated Sakura. Sasuke knows this, and there’s so much he would change if he had it do over again.

“I wonder why she didn’t tell me,” Naruto says.

Sasuke runs a hand over his face. “I asked her not to. I wanted to keep it between us.”

Naruto looks at him, and his eyes are pure blue again. “You must have hurt her bad, Sasuke, and you can’t just leave it like this. You gotta try to make things right.”

“I don’t know how,” he admits. “I think I might have ruined us.”

Naruto smiles and shakes his head. “That’s the thing about our team that you never understood: nothing can do that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really can’t thank my readers enough for leaving kudos and comments. We’re closing in on the end now, just two chapters left, and it’s a little bittersweet. I’ve so enjoyed writing and sharing this fic, and everyone’s support has been so encouraging. And I owe a big thank you to uchihasass and tall-girl-in-a-small-world for their help with this chapter. I couldn’t do this without you ladies!


	14. Chapter 14

Sasuke takes his chances and goes to the hospital. At first he thinks he got lucky and missed Sakura, but then she walks into his room and says, “Akiko tells me you have two fractured ribs and contusions all over your abdomen.” She washes and dries her hands, approaches him. “Let me guess: you and Naruto were sparring.”

“No, we had a fight. A real one.”

Sakura examines his chest, her hands gentle but clinical. There is no warmth to her touch, no tenderness as she begins to heal his ribs. “What was it about?” she asks.

Sasuke hesitates, then says, “You.”

She makes a sound between a laugh and a cough. “Me?”

“I told him about us.”

The flow of Sakura’s chakra breaks for just a moment, but she recovers quickly and asks, “Well, this is a little funny, don’t you think?”

Sasuke scowls. “I don’t quite see how my broken ribs are funny.”  

“You were the one who was so dead-set on not telling anyone about our—” She pauses, bites her lip, and says, “Our relationship. Then after it’s over you tell Naruto. See, funny.”

When he doesn’t answer, she just goes on, tone flippant. “Though I suppose now I can fill in Ino and TenTen and Hinata, so I guess I should thank you. Really, I bet Temari would want to know too, she’s said before that she’s curious about what you’d be like in bed. Next time I’m in Suna I could tell her all about how you—”

“Sakura,” Sasuke says. “I know what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?” she asks innocently.

“Stop trying to make me angry.”

“Why, is it working?” She gives him a bright smile, false but beautiful, and moves on to mending the bruises across his chest and stomach.

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

Sakura stands so close to him that he can smell her soap. It’s unfamiliar, a citrus scent instead of herbal, lemon maybe, and Sasuke wonders what else has changed in the months since she stopped sharing his bed.

“Are you seeing someone?” he asks.

She looks up from her work, briefly, to frown at him. “You know I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Are you sleeping with anybody?” Sasuke clarifies.

A pink flush spreads across Sakura’s fair cheeks. “That really isn’t any of your business,” she says.

“Maybe not, but I’m asking anyway.”  

She steps away from him and crosses her arms around her middle, even though his skin is still marked by a smattering of blue bruises. “What is it you want to hear? That there hasn’t been anyone since you? That I’m not even tempted, because other men can’t possibly compare to the great Uchiha Sasuke? Are you that arrogant?”

He knows he should sit still, shut up, and let her finish healing him so he can get out of here. Whatever Naruto had in mind when he told Sasuke to fix things, this certainly wasn’t it. But he hasn’t seen this much emotion from Sakura since their last mission together, and instead of being quiet, he goads her. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You haven’t been with anyone, and you aren’t tempted.”

Sasuke can’t know this for certain, but he suspects he’s right—he suspects, because he feels the same way. The last woman he slept with was Sakura, and he hasn’t once in the intervening months had the desire to have sex with anyone else.

He thinks for a moment that she might give in to her temper and smack him across the face, like he deserves, but she doesn’t.

Sakura opens the door and summons the brown-haired medic nin who admitted him. “I’m done for the day,” she says evenly. “Sasuke is your patient now, Akiko.”

After she leaves, Sasuke swears so violently that Akiko puts her hand over her mouth. He doesn’t much care though; all his regret is reserved for his dealings with Sakura. He can’t seem to do anything right where she’s concerned.

 

Sakura finds that it’s easier not to miss Sasuke when she’s angry at him. Really, she’s almost glad that he showed his antagonistic side at the hospital, because it diminishes the ache of his absence.

_This is why I left_ , she reminds herself. _I did the right thing_.

She waits for Naruto at Ichiraku for five, ten, fifteen minutes. They have met here on the last Sunday of the month, just the two of them, every year since the war ended, and in all this time she has never known him to be late for ramen.

At half-past noon, he takes the seat next to her and orders. Quiet and frowning, Naruto doesn’t look at her, doesn’t say anything. They eat in silence until Sakura can’t stand it anymore. “Sasuke said he told you about—about us.”

Naruto sighs. “He did.”

“You broke two of his ribs, you know,” Sakura says.

“Good. He deserved it.” Naruto turns up his bowl and drinks the remaining broth.

“Can’t argue with that.”

He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, and Sakura laughs. “You’re so dignified, Hokage-sama,” she says.

Naruto smiles, but the brightness in his expression fades after a moment. “I know Sasuke asked you not to, but I wish you’d told me.”

“I wanted to,” she says. “You’re my best friend.”

Naruto nods. He opens his mouth, hesitates, then asks, “Did he hurt you, Sakura-chan?”

She thinks of that night in Kiri, when he was so cold, when he told her there was nothing between them but sex. “Yes,” she says. “He did.”

Naruto’s fists clench on the counter, and Sakura reaches over, lays her hand on his. “But that’s between me and Sasuke, Naruto. I don’t want you beating him up anymore, okay?”

“It’s not like he didn’t fight back! Bastard broke my nose,” Naruto says. “Hinata healed me up good though.”

“Will you promise not to fight with him? At least not over this?” Sakura asks.

“Fine,” Naruto grumbles. “I promise.”

“Now, tell me about Kushina. Is she walking yet?”

He grins, wide and proudly, and says, “No, but she’s sure trying. And she’s crawling _everywhere_. You’ll never guess where Hinata found her yesterday…”

They speak of family and friends for the rest of the hour, and when they part ways Sakura feels better than she has in weeks; Naruto has that effect sometimes.

The next few months pass quickly. Sakura keeps herself busy with missions and hospital work and preparing her genin for the next chunin exams. She sees Sasuke when Team 7 gets together, but she rarely talks to him, and when she does her words are terse and to the point, uncolored by her feelings. Kushina takes her first step just two days before she turns a year old, and Naruto tells anyone in the village who will listen.

When she brings her birthday gift for Kushina to the Uzumakis’ house, she finds that Hinata is there alone with the baby, and she invites Sakura in for a cup of tea.

“Naruto-kun’s been so busy these last few days, I’ve barely seen him,” Hinata says softly. “And I need company that can speak full sentences.”

Sakura laughs and steps inside. Kushina’s toys are scattered across the floor, and the baby herself runs around the living room on chubby legs. “Saka!” she says, and holds up her arms to be picked up.

Sakura lifts Kushina, settles her on her hip, and says, “Happy late birthday, little girl.” She kisses the baby’s round cheek and carries her into the kitchen.

Hinata makes a cinnamon-ginger tea, for which Sakura is thankful. She’ll never drink jasmine again, no matter how much her mother and Ino may like it.

Kushina wriggles and whines after a minute of being held, so Sakura sets her down and watches her run off into the living room. “I can’t believe how big she’s getting.”

“I know,” Hinata says. “She’s growing up so fast.”

They sit and talk of Konoha and drink hot tea together, and Sakura feels content. At peace on this warm summer day with her friend.

“Are you going back to work soon?” she asks. “Naruto told me that you wanted to start taking missions again after Kushina turned one.”

Hinata smiles. “I’m starting back next week, with Kiba and Shino. It’ll be good, having the old team back together.”

Something must show on Sakura’s face—a hint of sadness, maybe—because Hinata tilts her head to the side and asks, “Is something wrong?”

Sakura turns her warm teacup in her hands and looks down, looks anywhere but at Hinata’s Byakugan. Eyes that see everything are unsettling when you have something to hide. “No,” she says. “It’s just, well, things have been difficult for my team lately. I miss the way we used to be.”

Hinata nods, takes a breath, and says nothing at all.

“What?” Sakura asks. “What is it?”

“I-I don’t know what’s going on, between you and Sasuke-kun,” she says. “Naruto hasn’t told me anything, and I haven’t asked him. But Sasuke’s been coming to me for months now, every time he’s injured, because he’s afraid of seeing you at the hospital.”

“He has?” Sakura wraps her arms around herself and says, “The last time I treated him we—well, we sort of had a fight.”

“I see.” Hinata fidgets, then says, “He always asks after you. I think he misses you, Sakura.”

She shakes her head. “I doubt it. The only person he really cares about is Naruto.”

“I don’t think you’re right about that,” Hinata says gently. “You didn’t see the look on his face when he said your name.”

Sakura tries not to read too much into this, but it’s hard. It’s very hard.

 

As a child, when he ran from Itachi, ran to save his miserable life, he knew he was a coward at heart. It’s something Sasuke has worked to overcome, an ugly truth about himself that he’s masked with skill and endless training and arrogance. But sometimes, when faced with a task that seems insurmountable, he remembers: he isn’t brave, not when it matters.

He stands outside of Sakura’s apartment building for the third evening in a row, willing himself to go to her door and knock. Sasuke lingers there for five minutes, ten, before finally giving up. Unlike last night and the night before, however, he doesn’t return home. Instead, he goes to a bar, orders the most expensive shochu, and drinks.

Sasuke doesn’t share Naruto’s confidence in the immutability of Team 7—if he did, he never would have left Konoha in the first place—and so he has no reason to believe that anything he says could fix things between him and Sakura.

“Bad night?” the bartender asks.

“Bad life,” Sasuke answers, before he can think better of it. The alcohol has made him loose-lipped, and he immediately regrets saying something so pathetic.

He’s been doing that a lot lately, saying things he shouldn’t. All the more reason to leave Sakura in peace tonight.

The bartender only laughs. “Is it a woman or work?”

“Not _a_ woman,” Sasuke says. “ _The_ woman.”

“Ah.” The bartender pours him another. “In that case, this one’s on me.”

“Thank you.” He drinks it and asks for two more.

An hour later, Sasuke is drunker than he’s ever been in his life. He has learned that the bartender’s name is Ban, and that he inherited this fine establishment from his father, Gendo. Ban is smart enough not to ask about the Uchiha or the Akatsuki, but he does say, “If a woman like that wanted me, I’d be married with a houseful of ninja brats by now.”

Sasuke narrows his eyes. “How do you know what kind of woman she is? I didn’t tell you anything about her.”

Ban smiles. “Please, half the village—even the civilian half—knows that Haruno Sakura is in love with you. Who else could you be talking about?”

Sasuke decides that it’s time to go. He pulls out a wad of ryo from his pocket, counts out the necessary bills (a task that takes much longer than it normally might), and lays them on the bar.

He leaves, heads back to his apartment, but halfway there Sasuke changes his mind and turns around. There’s nothing at home for him, nothing that matters.

 

Sakura spends the morning on a short mission with her genin, the afternoon working at the hospital, and the night studying a medical text on poisons. One of Chiyo’s students is the author, and she hopes to glean something of the old woman’s wisdom by reading it.

She’s on the third chapter when she hears her front door open. She would think an enemy shinobi was breaking into her house, except that any ninja worth his salt would never have made so much noise. Still, Sakura arms herself with the kunai from her bedside table and sneaks into the hallway, keeping her back close to the wall.

Then she sees him.

“Sasuke?”

“Sakura, there you are,” he says, but there’s something wrong with his speech. He sounds hoarse, and his words come too slowly. When he walks toward her he stumbles and almost falls. Sakura rushes forward, pockets her kunai, and catches him by his broad shoulders.

She’s close enough to him now that she can smell the alcohol on his breath. “Are you _drunk_?”

“No,” he says, then, “Maybe.”

Sakura has seen Sasuke drink several times over the years, but she has never seen him like this. Unfocused, unguarded.

She lets go of him and takes a step back. “What are you doing here?”

He reaches for her, cups her cheek, and she feels herself blush under his palm. “I miss you,” Sasuke says.

Sakura shakes her head weakly. “You can’t do this to me. You can’t come here and say this and expect me to—”

He kisses her, and her mouth opens to his. She tastes him, tastes the liquor on his tongue. His hands are in her hair, around her waist, pulling her closer, and Sakura can’t help it, for a moment she lets him. But when he grabs at the front of her pajamas, clumsy as he unbuttons her shirt, she remembers all the reasons why she can’t allow this to happen.   

“No,” Sakura breathes, and he stills, stops trying to undress her.

“I—I need you to get out,” she says, and Sakura doesn’t care that her voice breaks, that he can see how shaken she is.

“Please,” he whispers, his voice rough.

“Leave.” Sakura grasps his shirt, holding on to him even as she tells him to go. “Just leave me alone, Sasuke.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he says. “I love you.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here it is: the penultimate chapter. I hope you guys enjoyed, even though I certainly left you on quite the cliffhanger this time. Chapter 15 is already done and off to my betas, though, so you shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out what happens next. It’s my hope to be able to update with the last installment next Saturday. Thank you to my betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass, for all their help, as well as to everyone who has been leaving kudos and comments. Every little message encourages me, and I appreciate them all.


	15. Chapter 15

Sakura knows that Sasuke is the love of her life; she just isn’t his—a harsh reality that has taken her years to accept, so when he says this, says he loves her, she doesn’t know what to think.

Sakura shakes her head. “You’re drunk.”

He cups her cheeks, tilts her face up, making her look at him. His eyes are glassy, lips slightly parted, as if he’s on the verge of another confession. She can feel his hands trembling. He’s _scared_. Sasuke, always so calm and collected, is standing in her living room, shaking and vulnerable and nervous.

“I mean it,” he says, and his voice sounds stronger now, more sober.

She wants to believe him, she does, but one drunken admission is difficult to trust in the face of so much contrary evidence.

“Tell me again in the morning,” Sakura says. “Then we’ll talk. Okay?”

Sasuke nods. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

She runs her hands down his chest, feels the hardness of his muscles through his shirt. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’re not yourself right now.”

“Just to sleep,” Sasuke says, and he looks so weary that Sakura can’t turn him away.

“All right.” She takes his hand and smiles softly. “Come to bed.”

Even in the shape he’s in, Sasuke still folds his clothes and sets his shoes neatly by the door (if a little more sluggishly than he normally might).

Sakura falls asleep in his arms for the first time since last summer, and when she wakes in the morning she feels better rested than she has for nearly a year. She yawns, stretches, and turns over, only to discover that Sasuke’s side of the bed is cold and empty. He’s gone.

Maybe this should hurt, but she’s too unsurprised to be disappointed.

She makes herself move, goes to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice—and finds Sasuke sitting at her table, fully dressed, his head in his hands. He looks up when he hears her, and his eyes are blank, unreadable.

Sakura’s heart beats faster, thumps almost painfully against her ribcage. Sasuke didn’t leave. _He’s still here_.

“How do you feel?” she asks quietly.

“Fine,” he says.

She takes a seat in the chair across from him. “There’s no justice in this world,” she says. “If I drank like that I’d be sick as a dog the next day.”

“Hn.” He props his elbows on the table, laces his fingers together, and rests his face against his hands. The movement is so familiar, so much the Sasuke she knew when they were at the Academy, that it almost hurts to watch.

She waits for him to say something, _anything_ , but he doesn’t. So she asks, “Do you remember last night?”

Whether he blacked out or not, this is the perfect opportunity for Sasuke to get out of dealing with the consequences of his actions, and she half expects him to take it.

Instead, he says, “I do. I remember it all.”

She tries to gauge his mood from his expression, but there’s nothing there. Sasuke has made an art of shutting people out, of concealing what he thinks and feels. Sakura’s not going to learn anything from watching him; she’s going to have to listen, if only he’ll talk.

“Is it true?” she asks. “Do you love me?”

Silence settles between them for one moment, two, and for some reason all Sakura can think of is that stupid game she used to play as a child, plucking the petals off of flowers to determine whether Sasuke-kun loved her or not. It feels like she’s been playing for a long time, going back and forth, waiting to see which petal she would land on in the end.

Then Sasuke says, “Yes.”

She bites her lip to keep from smiling too widely.

“I shouldn’t have told you last night, not like that,” Sasuke says, and he sounds almost apologetic. “You deserve better.”

“I don’t care,” Sakura says. _He loves me_ , she thinks, _Sasuke loves me_. That’s all that matters.

She stands up, walks around the table, and holds his face between her hands. He leans into her touch, and it’s such a simple display of honest affection that it gives her hope, makes her braver. Sakura is afraid to ask, but there are things she needs to know. “So what does this mean for us? What do you want from me?”

“Everything,” Sasuke says. “I want everything.”

 

They spend all day in bed. First making love, then making up for lost time. Just kissing, holding, talking. After so many months without Sakura, every touch feels like a gift, and for the first time in a long time Sasuke is content.

She brushes his hair out of his face, traces the line of his jaw. There’s something soft but sad in the way she looks at him. “You can’t hurt me again,” she says. “If you do, it’ll be the last time. You know that, right?”

“I do,” Sasuke says. “Things will be different this time. I’ll be different.”

She lays her head on his chest, over his heart. “I’ll hold you to that.”  

Hunger finally drives them to the kitchen, but they’re both feeling too lazy to cook, so they cut up the fruit Sakura bought from Mr. Yaguchi yesterday morning. They sit on the counter half-naked, side by side, sharing a plate of apple slices.

“Sorry there aren’t any tomatoes. I wasn’t expecting you,” Sakura says. “I guess I should keep them around from now on, huh?”

He nods and bites into another piece of apple, and it’s crisp and sweet on his tongue. “I’d appreciate that.”

After they eat, they go back to bed. When Sasuke sees her tangled up in the sheets, pale eyes heavy-lidded, pink hair spread across a pillow, he’s suddenly overwhelmed by his need for this woman. To have her, to love her. He wants to tell Sakura these things, but he doesn’t know how. So instead of speaking, he taps her forehead with his first two fingers.

“What was that for?” Sakura asks.

“It’s something my brother used to do to me when we were children,” he says. “I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I think it was a way to show he cared.”

“Sasuke...” She reaches for him, takes his hand. Her grasp is warm and strong, like the rest of her. “Thank you.”

He kisses Sakura, and she kisses back, pulls him on top of her. “Again?” he asks, and Sasuke can feel a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. Sakura wraps her legs around his waist and whispers in his ear, “Am I wearing you out, Sasuke-kun?”  

He presses her into the mattress, sucks at the soft skin of her neck until she whimpers and a purple bruise blooms beneath his mouth. People will see it and know he marked her, will know that she’s his. _Good_. He has had his fill of secrets and subterfuge.

Sasuke makes love to her less tenderly than he had this morning. Now there’s something desperate in the way they come together, an impatience in his grip on her thigh, in his thrusts. Sakura is rough too, her short fingernails digging into his back. The scratches sting, and no doubt there will be ten parallel welts running down either side of his spine by the time this is done, but Sasuke doesn’t care. She feels good, so good, and he gets caught up in the sound of her moans, her pleas and promises. Somehow he keeps control, slips a hand between her legs, touches her in the way that makes her unravel. And she’s beautiful all the time, but she’s breath-taking like this: eyes closed, nipples peaked and back arched, mouth open on a cry.

After, he’s trembling, panting, barely able to hold his weight atop her. Sasuke brushes his lips across her forehead, her cheek, her pink mouth. He wants to kiss her everywhere, claim her body all over again, but when he dips his head to her breasts, Sakura laughs, grabs him by his hair, and says, “I need a break.”

Sasuke rests his head on her chest and smiles against her skin. “I thought you were gonna wear me out, or did I hear you wrong?”

Sakura slaps his back, just hard enough to sting a little. “You’re an ass, you know that?”

“You love me anyway,” he says. “And you’ll keep loving me, won’t you?”

_Forever?_

Her breath catches and her heart beats faster. With his cheek pressed against her breast, he can feel these things. “Always,” she promises.

Sakura is his, his alone, for the rest of their days. Just as Sasuke is hers.

The thought is still frightening, and perhaps love will never be an easy thing for him to either accept or give, but if the last year has taught Sasuke anything, it’s that he needs Sakura. She is like air, like water: an element he simply cannot do without.

They decide to tell Naruto and Kakashi at Ichiraku the next day. Their sensei smiles beneath his mask and says, “It’s about time.”

Naruto grins at Sasuke. “Finally pulled your head out of your ass?” he asks.

“Shut up, dobe,” he says, but Sasuke can’t put much heat behind it, because his friend isn’t entirely wrong.

“Hey everybody!” Naruto shouts, and a hush falls over the restaurant as people turn to stare at the Hokage. “Your ramen is on me!”

A cheer goes up, and Naruto puts his arms around Sasuke and Sakura. “So when’s the wedding?” he asks.

“Naruto!” She punches him on the shoulder—“Ow, Sakura-chan, that hurts!”—and glances at Sasuke, looking flushed and anxious.

Naruto’s question doesn’t unsettle him in the way Sakura probably fears it might. It makes him uncomfortable, but only because he knows he doesn’t deserve her. Not yet.

 

The news about Sasuke and Sakura spreads around the village after Naruto’s display at Ichiraku. It takes all of twenty-four hours before Ino comes knocking on Sakura’s door, nosy and demanding, asking questions. When did it happen? How? Is he good in bed? Is he _bad_ in bed? How serious are things? She gives short, succinct answers, hoping to get the interrogation over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. 

“Stop trying to short-change me,” Ino says. “I deserve details.”

They’re sitting on a ratty, old blanket on the roof of Sakura’s apartment, sunning themselves and drinking not-sweet-enough lemonade (and that’s what she gets for putting Sasuke in charge of adding the sugar).

“And why, exactly, are you entitled to information about my love life?” Sakura asks.

“Because we’re friends.” Ino sips the lemonade and winces. “Ugh, sorry, but I don’t think I can drink this.”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s pretty awful.” Sakura sets her own glass aside, and it’s a shame, really, because Konoha has been hellishly hot for weeks and a cold drink that doesn’t turn your mouth inside out would be refreshing right now.

She and Ino lay down, side by side, holding hands loosely, lazily. Sakura closes her eyes against the bright summer sun and listens to the sounds of birds singing and people negotiating the space on the street below.

“How are things between you and Shikamaru?” Sakura asks.

“Great, except that I can barely get him to help with chores around the house.”

“Then you should kick his lazy ass,” Sakura says. “That, or stop cleaning.”

“Eww, do I look like I want to live in a hovel?” Ino asks. “But kicking his ass, that I could do.”  

They laugh, and then Ino says, too-casual, “Oh, by the way, you’re invited to my mother’s wedding.”

“Your mother’s _what_?”

“Wedding,” Ino says again, slowly and carefully. “It’s that celebration of two people becoming celibate together for the rest of their lives.”

“Since when is your mother getting married?” Sakura asks. “I knew she and Tetsuya were serious, but I didn’t realize he was husband material.”

“Yeah, well, neither did I,” Ino says. and if there’s a trace of bitterness in her voice, Sakura decides that it’s wiser and kinder not to point this out. “Anyway, you’re invited, and since you can bring a guest, I guess Sasuke is too. Or are you guys not at the going to formal events together phase yet?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll talk to him and find out,” Sakura says. She and Sasuke still haven’t been on a proper date, and regardless of all his promises that things will be better this time, she’s nervous to ask him to go on one with her.

“So, how are you doing?” Ino asks. “I mean, you’ve loved Sasuke for forever, so getting together has got to feel good, right?”

Sakura can’t help but smile. She’s been doing that a lot lately, grinning for no good reason except that she’s deeply, beautifully, recklessly happy. “It feels like… like coming home after a long trip.”

“Oh. That’s a little underwhelming.”

She laughs and lets go of Ino’s hand just so she can swat her arm. “Well, it also feels like the most incredible sex of my life.”

Her friend snorts. “Not like that would be hard to accomplish, considering that the bastard is the only one of your loser boyfriends to ever even get you off.”

“Taro was never my boyfriend,” Sakura corrects.

“Whatever, it’s not like Sasuke’s got a lot of competition,” Ino says in that playfully confrontational way she sometimes has. “But if you say he’s good, I’ll take your word for it.”

Sakura has a horrible thought, and she sits up to ask, “You didn’t talk to your mother about this, did you?”

“What, your sex life with Konoha’s most brooding ninja?”

Sakura sighs, puts her hand to her face. “No, Pig, I mean did you tell her about me and Sasuke being together?”

“Of course I did, Forehead,” Ino says. “Something this juicy, I had to.”

“Well, thanks a lot. She’s going to tell my mother before I have a chance to.”

Ino laughs. “What do you mean ‘going to’? She already told her.”

Sure enough, when Sakura visits her parents’ house later that day, her mother and father pull her into a fierce hug, and Okaasan says, “I’m so happy for you, sweetheart.”

Otousan laughs and ruffles her hair, the way he used to when she was a little girl. “You’ve got to bring Sasuke around to dinner one of these nights.”

“Only if you promise not to ask him a hundred questions,” Sakura says. “He’s a very private person, you know.”

Her mother sighs. “We’re not going to do anything to make him uncomfortable. We just want to get to know him a little better.”

“And I promise not to make any jokes,” her father says. “Even though his hair is really asking for it.”

“Otousan!” Sakura can’t help but laugh. “You really don’t have room to talk about anyone else’s hair.”

Okaasan insists that Sunday night would be the perfect time to get together, but Sakura shakes her head. Sasuke might say he wants everything from her, but she doubts that he’s ready for this, to be welcomed into a family.

 

There’s something on Sakura’s mind. She’s quiet throughout dinner, and when they go to bed she seems distracted, less responsive when he touches her. Reluctantly, Sasuke stops kissing the soft swell of her breast and asks, “What is it?”

Sakura looks away from him, then back, and when she speaks her voice is nervous, hesitant. “Ino’s mother is getting married. I’m invited to the wedding, and I was wondering if you’d like to come with me.”

Sasuke barely knows Ino and hardly likes her—he cares little for anyone outside of Team 7—and he’s not once met her mother that he can recall. He hates crowds and finds formal events as purposeless as they are tedious, but he can see the way Sakura’s body has tensed, how she’s holding her breath, waiting for his answer. For some reason this is important to her, and that alone is enough to decide the matter for him. “I’ll go,” he says.

Sakura smiles, kisses him, and says, “Thank you, Sasuke-kun.”

And this is how he ends up attending a wedding where he knows neither the bride nor the groom. Half the guests give him a wide berth, either too reverent of the war hero or too disapproving of the war criminal to speak to him. This isn’t new, though, so Sasuke isn’t bothered by it.

Ino’s mother wears the traditional white kimono, Tetsuya the expected black. They share sake and exchange quiet vows that Sasuke can barely hear from the back of the shrine, and within twenty minutes the whole ceremony is over.

As he and Sakura walk to the reception site (one of Konoha’s better inns), he says, “This is the first wedding I’ve attended in sixteen years.”

She slips her hand into his and asks, “Who was getting married at the last wedding you went to?”

“My cousin Saiyuri,” Sasuke says, and he remembers her smiling face like it was yesterday. (He also recalls what Saiyuri looked like with a kunai wedged between her empty, dark eyes, all the light of life extinguished from them, but Sasuke pushes that ugly memory away.) “Her husband was a Nara, though, and after we got home the only thing my father had to say was that no children of his would marry outside the clan.”

“Oh.” Sakura frowns and says, “I don’t suppose he would have approved of me then.”

“No, he wouldn’t have,” Sasuke says honestly. “But my mother would have loved you.”

Her smile is soft, and a dimple awakens in her right cheek. “You really think so?”

He nods. “And I believe you would have liked her too.”

“Would you tell me about her?” Sakura asks.

He considers this request, then says, “My mother was kind. She always told me that she was proud of me, and she never let me think she loved me less than Itachi.” _Unlike Otousan_ , he could have said, but Sasuke lets Uchiha Fugaku’s failings as a father rest. Whatever mistakes the man made, he paid for them many times over. “I look like her, but I didn’t inherit much from her beyond that. She was gentle. Forgiving.” Of all the members of their small family, she was the one who most deserved to be spared, but lately Sasuke doesn’t quite wish that Okaasan had lived instead of him.

“You’re gentle with me,” Sakura says. “Maybe you have more of her in you than you think.”

“Maybe.” He leans over and presses a kiss to her forehead.

She blushes, then says, “I used to fantasize about you doing that. In my daydreams you always found my huge forehead charming.”

“Is it big?” Sasuke asks, somewhat puzzled. “I never noticed.”

Sakura laughs, a sound that he thinks he could hear every day for the rest of his life and never grow tired of.

At the reception, she pulls him onto the dance floor and says, “You’ll spin me around and hold me and kiss me, because that’s what dates do at weddings, and you are my date, aren’t you, Sasuke-kun?”

“It seems so,” he says.

Dancing with Sakura isn’t precisely a hardship. She has a kunoichi’s grace, and watching her move in time with the music is as intoxicating as it is frustrating. He can smell the citrus scent of her new shampoo, and he’s just on the verge of suggesting that they leave early, when Ino approaches and says, “Hey, Sasuke. Can I cut in?”

She takes Sakura by the arm without waiting for his answer and starts dancing with her. Ino says something a moment later that makes Sakura smile. She looks joyful, beautiful, radiant, and Sasuke can hardly believe that after everything he’s put her through, he still has the love of a woman like this.

 

Sasuke doesn’t move in with Sakura all at once. His things drift into her apartment, piece by piece, until there are more of his possessions at her place than at the spartan flat he once called his own. Sometime between summer and autumn, Sakura gives him a key, and sometime between autumn and winter, Sasuke breaks his lease. By spring, he asks if perhaps she might like to move somewhere larger. A house instead of an apartment, perhaps. 

“Why? Don’t you like it here?”

“I do,” he says, “but it’s a little small.”

“There’s plenty of room for just the two of us,” Sakura says.

“But it’s not always going to be just the two of us,” Sasuke says, with such blase confidence that Sakura thinks she must be mistaking his meaning.

“How many, um, extra rooms do you think we might need?” she asks.

His smile is so subtle than anyone besides Sakura would have missed it. “One or two,” he says. “What do you think?”

“Let’s go with two,” she says. “Just to be on the safe side.”

They find a three-bedroom house on the southern outskirts of the village, and for the most part Sakura adores their new home. She only misses the noise and liveliness of her flat on nights when Sasuke is gone, when she suffers the wide silences that echo the emptiness of her cold bed. He stays in Konoha much more than he used to, but Sasuke still often takes assignments that send him far from the Leaf. He’s a wanderer, and it isn’t always easy to love a man with an itinerant heart.

The night before Sasuke leaves for another long mission, Sakura asks, “Where are you headed to this time?”

“Snow,” he says. “I shouldn’t be gone more than two weeks.”

She tries to smile, to think of all the things she’ll have more time for in his absence. Sakura has been waiting on Sasuke, in one way or another, for so many years that she’s grown used to the loneliness it brings. But her waiting is made easier by the promise of his return. Because no matter how far he strays, Sasuke will always come back to her.

 

Sasuke remembers the old Konoha like this. The smell of breakfast cooking in the morning, suffusing the home he shares with Otousan and Okaasan and Nisan. His mother’s smile. His father’s voice. Itachi poking his forehead as he says, “Maybe next time.” Later, the resounding silence of a barren house. Cobwebs in the kitchen, because Sasuke can’t make himself clean, can’t even make himself get up off the floor. And then Team 7: Kakashi, Naruto, and Sakura. 

The old Konoha is dead, but the new Konoha is alive, and Sasuke knows now that what he remembers isn’t as important as what he discovers every day.

Still, he will never forget his father’s lessons. How to sort truth from lies just by watching the subtle shifts of expression across a man’s face. How to tell from the dawn whether it will rain tonight. How not to think, but _know_ , where a shuriken will land when you throw it. But for all his gifts of perception, it took Sasuke twelve years to see Sakura, and he wonders if maybe he spent his time studying the wrong things.

Perhaps he ought to abandon Otousan’s teachings, but Sasuke is still learning to look forward instead of back, and he finds a certain comfort in the simple act of watching, playing games of sight. This is the rich blue of a robin’s egg. This is the gold of summer sunlight on the Naka River.

This is the green of Uchiha Sakura’s eyes when she is happy—a color he sees often these days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning, ridiculously long notes ahead.
> 
> So, this is the end, and I really hope that it’s one you guys enjoy. Thank you so much for all of your support throughout my writing of this fic! Kudos and comments just make me ridiculously giddy.
> 
> In Times of Peace may be over, but I have a couple of new Naruto projects in the works, and I certainly hope some of you will stick around to read them once I start posting. I’m going to do a quick plug for each story, just to give you all an idea of what will be coming up.
> 
> Children of War will be a Minato/Kushina prequel fic that follows Naruto’s parents from the age of nine to the day the Kyuubi attacks Konoha. Among other things, I’m going to try to explore the complications of using child soldiers during wartime. In this story, Kushina struggles with being taken from home and becoming the Nine-Tails jinchuriki, while Minato quickly moves up the Konoha ranks despite coming from a civilian family. I should state up front that, because of Minato’s dysfunctional home life, this story will include depictions of/mentions of domestic abuse, rape, and forced abortion, so it may not be for everyone. 
> 
> The Valley of the End is a SasuSaku and NaruHina story in an alternate Konoha in which Madara won the battle at the Valley of the End, and then became the First Hokage instead of Hashirama. It is set during the regular Naruto timeline, but the world looks quite different, with the Uchiha in charge of the village. It will be Team 7-centric, and the point-of-view characters are Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto. This story will feature some forbidden love SasuSaku, Sasuke as the son of the Fourth Hokage, Naruto with parents who are alive, and a Sakura who is an equal and a rival to her male teammates. 
> 
> I should also mention that this line— “He’s a wanderer, and it isn’t always easy to love a man with an itinerant heart.”—was undoubtedly influenced by windsilk’s incredible wanderer!verse story, constellations, which everyone should go check out immediately. 
> 
> Last but certainly not least, I want to thank my betas, tall-girl-in-a-small-world and uchihasass. You ladies have been a tremendous help throughout this process, and I can’t wait to work with you on my new projects!


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